


it's in your nature to fear what is natural

by auroralynches (teresavampa)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: "and you had sex how many times? hmm. yeah that's not technically a bromance": the musical, (there are no actual sex scenes but it's mentioned), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Communication Issues, Friends With Benefits To Lovers, Gay Bucky Barnes, Interfaith Bucky Barnes, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, POV Multiple, Period Typical Attitudes, Period Typical Bigotry, Pining, Winter Soldier Umbrella Warnings, no canon we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:08:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24380326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teresavampa/pseuds/auroralynches
Summary: Then the other man had curled closer to Bucky in his sleep, and Bucky had felt a wave of heartbreaking tenderness crest over him. For a moment, he'd justlonged, not knowing if it was for Steve or for this man beside him or for some hypothetical love that didn’t come with a predetermined expiration date.Dorothy always has to go home to Kansas in the end.
Relationships: Howling Commandos & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes & Howling Commandos, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, minor Bucky Barnes/Howard Stark - Relationship, minor Bucky Barnes/Original Male Characters
Comments: 35
Kudos: 131





	it's in your nature to fear what is natural

**Author's Note:**

> The best way to understand this fic's relationship to canon is that it's not so much a consciously canon-divergent AU as it is an "I haven't paid attention to canon in like six years" AU. Just imagine that I wrote this immediately after _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ came out and you'll be fine. Time isn't real in quarantine and my brain has decided that that means it's 2014 again.
> 
> That said, one quick canon reminder before we start: [hey, remember when Agent Carter season 1 more or less confirmed that Howard Stark was in love with Steve?](https://astrailhads.tumblr.com/post/615439874812772352/astrailhads1x04-1x08)
> 
> Lastly, here's a big ol' warning for internalized homophobia, which plays a pretty huge role throughout this fic.
> 
> Title is from ["Morton's Fork"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jeB8HbuGV0) by Typhoon.

Joseph Rogers is killed in a trench on the Western Front on June 9th, 1918, leaving behind a wife carrying his unborn child, a Bible whose cover is attached to the spine by a few weak threads, and little else. His body is left in Europe; his widow buries an empty casket in Brooklyn, surrounded by neighbors but no family.

This is the story that Steve hears whenever his neighbors scold him for being impertinent. They tell him that his father, a quiet, gentle man with a beard and bookish tendencies, would be ashamed to see his son shouting and misbehaving and carrying on. They tell him that there’s far too much of his spitfire mother in him, an unfortunate consequence of being raised without Joseph’s influence.

Whenever Steve asks his mother if she thinks that the neighbors are right when they say that he’d be a very different person if his father hadn’t died, Sarah always smiles and says, “Yes, but he would have liked how you turned out anyway.”

The sorts of stories Sarah tells him about his father are different. She likes to reminisce about the time in 1916 when she heard that the women of the Suffrage Union would be marching through Union Square. Even though she and Joseph were fresh off the boat, and even though none of their new acquaintances in New York would be going, she had immediately begun planning how to travel to Manhattan to join the demonstration.

“So then your da said to me,” she tells Steve, her eyes sparkling at the memory, “he said, ‘Sarah, we can’t vote anyway. We’re not citizens. Why do you care?’ Well, I looked at him and said, ‘They’re doing the right thing. How could I not?’ And your da just smiled and told me, ‘Sarah, your big heart is a holy thing.’ And he went with me.”

Steve likes it when Sarah can smile at the thought of his father. Not that she’s prone to wallowing—she’s far too busy and practical for that—but occasionally he’ll catch her staring wistfully out the window from Joseph’s reading chair or running her fingertips lightly over the bookmark he’d left in his Bible.

It’s the same Bible that Sarah clutches in her hands and prays over when Steve is six and comes down with scarlet fever, which leads to rheumatic fever, which leads to a heart condition that the doctor says will likely leave him undersized and sickly his whole life. When the doctor tells her this, Sarah cries for the first and only time that Steve has seen. Even then, she swiftly fights back the tears and offers Steve a watery smile. “Well,” she tells him, “at least the soul can be strong even when the body is weak.”

If Steve’s soul is strong, he’s pretty sure it’s a trait he got from her. Whenever Mrs. O’Meara from next door implies that Sarah should really think about remarrying so Steve can have a proper father figure, Sarah always smiles sweetly and asks, “Are you offering, Jane?” While most immigrants Steve knows do their best to flatten their accents around Americans, Sarah speaks to everyone in the same lyrical brogue even when it gets her dirty looks. She sings to him in thin, lilting Irish, calling him _án leanbhán_ when she’s feeling particularly sentimental.

Steve watches Sarah stand firm in front of everyone and everything that would have her bend to their will, and he wonders how anyone could look at his brave, willful, principled mother and think they stand a chance against her. When the neighbors tell him that he’s Sarah’s boy through and through, Steve smiles and thanks them because he knows that what they’re seeing is Sarah’s conviction and her big holy heart.

It’s why, when he meets Bucky, Steve has the immediate sense that he’s found a kindred spirit.

By age nine, Steve is fairly accustomed to bullies. The ritual is always the same: some bigger, louder, meaner kid does something wrong, Steve stands up to him, and he promptly knocks Steve back into the dirt.

In this case, it’s because Tommy Novak had made fun of Sally Fischer’s limp on the playground. Steve had told him to leave her alone because everyone knew Sally’d had polio when she was two, and besides, making fun of people for being different was wrong. Tommy had considered this line of logic thoughtfully, then offered a well-reasoned counterpoint that consisted of slugging Steve in the gut.

Steve is still on all fours, trying to suck air back into his asthmatic lungs between retches, when he hears an unfamiliar voice call, “Hey, bozo! If you wanna prove you’re such a big man, why not try beating up on someone your own size instead of this shrimp?”

Tommy turns away from Steve and looks the new kid up and down. Steve can’t yet bring his head up enough to see what the kid looks like, but Tommy sounds unimpressed when he replies, “You think you can take me?”

“In a flash,” the new kid says.

Tommy scoffs. Steve turns his head just in time to see him start to throw a punch, only to be interrupted by the new kid kicking him hard in the groin. Tommy instantly drops to the ground, wheezing, “That’s not fair!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know there were _rules_ to beating up kids on playgrounds,” says the new kid with sarcastic shock. He nudges Tommy with the toe of his shoe. “Scram.” Tommy clambers to his feet and runs off.

Steve becomes aware that the new kid is extending his hand towards him in an offer of help. He grasps it and feels himself hauled to his feet. As he brushes his dirty palms off on his pants, the new kid holds out his hand. “Bucky. Sorry I called you a shrimp.”

Steve shakes his hand. “Steve. I’ve been called worse. You’re new here, right?”

Bucky grins. “Just moved up from Flatbush,” he confirms. “So is that a normal scene for you, gettin’ beat up like that?”

“Pretty normal,” Steve admits. “Lotsa guys think I have a smart mouth.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think…” Steve ponders the question. His memory snags on a phrase from a fairytale his mother once told him. “I think I get into trouble tryin’ to defend the weak and innocent.”

Bucky looks him over skeptically. “You are the weak and innocent,” he says.

“Am not!” To prove his point, Steve shoves Bucky’s shoulder—not hard enough to knock him over, just enough to demonstrate that he’s not completely feeble.

Bucky laughs. “Alright, you’re not,” he agrees. “But maybe you could use defendin’ anyway.”

And that’s it. From that moment on, they’re friends. After school, Bucky invites Steve to walk home with him and his sister Ruth, who’s two years younger than Bucky and a year younger than Steve. At their apartment, he meets Mrs. Barnes, who immediately asks him if he wants anything to eat, and four-year-old Maggie and little baby Becca, and he and Bucky sit out on the fire escape swinging their legs off the edge as they gab excitedly about the Dodgers.

The next day, Bucky is given permission to go over to Steve’s apartment, where Steve shares his art supplies and the two of them draw together, sprawled across the wooden floor. When Sarah gets home from work and Bucky introduces himself, she raises her eyebrows and asks, “ _Bucky?_ That cannot be your Christian name, can it?”

Bucky makes a face as though he’s considering the question with utmost solemnity. “Well, it’s short for James Buchanan, but I dunno which of those is my Christian name seein’ as my pop’s Catholic and my ma’s Jewish,” he says.

Mrs. O’Meara from next door would have considered this answer cheeky and smacked Bucky with a wooden spoon, but Sarah just laughs and ruffles his hair. In that moment, Steve feels a love for the two of them so big it threatens to pop his weak little nine-year-old heart. He knows he can come home with a thousand more skinned knees and split lips borne of standing up against bullies, and even though most everyone else would say he should quit trying, neither of the people in this kitchen will ever tell him to stop.

* * *

When Bucky is sixteen, he kisses Molly Doherty with tongue and feels her up over her blouse while they’re at a matinee. The first thing he does afterwards is tell Steve about it while they’re both lounging on Steve’s bedroom floor.

Steve, to his credit, smacks Bucky with his sketchpad. “Christ, Buck, how would Molly feel if she knew you were telling people that?” he scolds.

“I ain’t telling _people_ , I’m telling _you_ ,” Bucky argues. “So unless you’re gonna go telling people, Molly will never know I blabbed.”

Steve purses his lips in a way that Bucky knows means he’s won. Sure enough, instead of arguing, Steve asks, “What was it like?”

Bucky rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling, arms clasped on his stomach. What _had_ it been like? It was… nice, he supposes, but if he’s being totally honest with himself, he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. His mouth puckers at the memory of her unpleasantly waxy-tasting lipstick. His hands vaguely recall the sensation of lace under cotton.

Abruptly, and for no particular reason that Bucky can tell, he remembers walking back from the movie theater with Molly and passing by a broad-shouldered dockworker heading in the opposite direction. Something about the man had made him uncomfortable, and even now, he feels a white-hot tug of nerves low in his gut.

“Soft,” he decides. Before Steve can press him for any more details, Bucky decides to change the subject. “Hey, whatcha drawing, anyhow?” he asks, propping himself up on his side.

Steve immediately looks embarrassed and tries to hide his sketchbook, which naturally means Bucky lunges for it. They wrestle for a moment, both careful not to damage the sketchbook—it had been a Christmas present from Bucky, who’d saved up money doing odd jobs for almost six months to afford it—until Steve laughs and cries, “Okay, okay! Get off me, ya big lunk.”

Bucky sits back on his heels, breathless and pleased. Steve sits up as well, his cheeks flushed with laughter and his hair sticking out wildly in every direction. Bucky loves it when Steve looks like that. “Well, show me what you got,” Bucky says, nodding at the sketchbook.

Steve flips it back open to the page he’d been working on and passes it over. It’s a partial portrait of a man, his face turned three-quarters away from the viewer towards a faint cross shape that’s probably meant to represent a window.

“I’m trying to get better at drawing people,” Steve admits. “It’s hard without a reference, though—look, see how his ear’s all wonky?” Sure enough, when Bucky looks closer he can tell that the man’s ear is set at a strange angle much too far back on his head.

A thought occurs to Bucky as he’s studying the drawing. “Well, you have a reference now, don’t you?” he asks.

Steve blinks. “You want me to draw you?”

“I’m just saying you could. I’m better-looking than that guy anyway, so that’ll probably help you out.”

“You really don’t know shit about art, do you?” Steve laughs. Bucky mentally preens when he realizes Steve didn’t deny that he’s better-looking than the man in the sketch. Steve picks up a pencil and indicates that Bucky should sit by his bedroom window. Bucky does so, obediently adjusting whenever Steve calls for him to angle his head differently or change his expression.

He lasts a heroic ten minutes before slumping out of his pose. “Christ, I’m sorry, Stevie, I just can’t do it anymore,” he declares. “I’m bored outta my skull just sitting here not moving.”

“You give up too easy,” Steve admonishes, flicking his fingers at Bucky.

“That I do,” Bucky agrees cheerfully. “So, ya got any new comic books or something?”

They settle in to read a _Famous Funnies_ issue with Buck Rogers on the cover, but Bucky doesn’t pay much attention to the plot. His mind keeps drifting back to the image of Steve sitting across from him, hair mussed and cheeks pink.

* * *

Eleven years on from their first meeting, the scene hasn’t changed all that much. Bucky isn’t even looking for Steve, just walking home from work and trying not to sweat too much in the late-August heat when he hears Steve’s voice coming from behind a diner. When he investigates, sure enough, there’s Steve taking swings at a guy twice his size.

Bucky doesn’t bother saying anything, just pops the guy in the nose with a quick punch and sends him scurrying away down the alley. “You gonna need a doctor, or should I just take you home?” he asks, turning to Steve.

Steve experimentally touches a bruise on his face, apparently making sure his cheekbone isn’t broken. Satisfied, he flashes Bucky a grin and says, “Jeez, buy a guy a drink first, Buck.”

Bucky knows Steve didn’t mean anything by it, but he feels a flash of cold nonetheless. He doesn’t let it show on his face, instead opting to smirk and say, “Pretty sure _you_ owe _me_ after the way I just saved your ass.”

They head home, which is no longer the Barnes’ jumbled rooms or Sarah Rogers’ apartment with its lovely windows and spotless counters. Bucky had moved into the Rogers’ place to try to help Steve with the rent after Sarah died last May, but neither of them have found particularly steady work, and soon enough they’d had to downsize to a one-bedroom in a tenement closer to the East River. The single bedroom with its full-size mattress is only barely big enough for the two of them, but they can’t fit a second bed in there even if they could afford one; there isn’t room for much furniture in the whole apartment besides the bed, an old loveseat, and a dining set Bucky’s neighbor had sold him for fifty cents. Joseph Rogers’ reading chair now lives in the O’Mearas’ sitting room.

There’s a small wash basin in their bedroom that they prop their shaving mirror up on, but Bucky’s taken to storing a small medical kit under it, too. It had started out as a way of saving time when he has to run for Steve’s medicine in the middle of the night, but they both had quickly worked out that bandaging each other up after back-alley scraps is easier and more comfortable to do in the bedroom than in their closet-sized bathroom.

Right now, Steve’s the only one who requires bandaging. It’s not the worst shape he’s ever been in after a fight—Bucky shudders to remember when Ricky Donaldson broke Steve’s nose so bad he could barely open his eyes for all the swelling—but his knuckles are worn ragged and his face is oozing blood in at least three different places. Bucky steers Steve over to the sink and faces him towards the bed. He wets a washcloth before sitting down on the end of the bed, Steve standing between his knees.

“I just don’t see,” Bucky says for what feels like the thousandth time in his life as he dabs the drying blood off of Steve’s hands, “why you hafta fight them every time.”

Steve hisses as the washcloth brushes his knuckles. “I told you, the guy was hassling the staff. Yankin’ on the waitress’ skirt, callin’ the busboy—well, all sorts of horrible names for black folk. I couldn’t just do nothing.”

“Yeah, but why _fight_ him? Why didn’t you stop at telling him to shut up and keep his hands to himself?” Bucky sets the damp cloth aside and begins wrapping Steve’s knuckles in gauze.

Steve looks down at him with one eye, the other still screwed shut from the pain in his hands. “I don’t go looking to fight people, Bucky,” he says, more quietly. “But if I tell someone to stop being a jerk and then back down the second they threaten to punch me—what’s that say about my principles?”

“That ‘know thy strength’ is one of them?” Bucky asks drily. He tapes down the end of the gauze and moves to check the damage on Steve’s face. The bed is high enough—and Steve is short enough—that he doesn’t have to stand up to do so; their faces are almost level with each other. There’s a sizable gash on Steve’s chin, accompanied by smaller ones just above his eyebrow and at the corner of his jaw. Bucky sets to work on the largest cut first, his eyes inadvertently raking across Steve’s lips as he does so.

As he begins cleaning the cut, Bucky softens just a little. “I get what you mean,” he admits. “If you’re not willing to accept the consequences of standin’ up for what’s right, you might as well not have stood up at all.”

Steve laughs, though he does it with his mouth closed to avoid disturbing Bucky’s work. “You sound like my ma,” he teases through barely-parted teeth.

Bucky laughs too. “Shit, that probably is something Sarah said, huh?” He picks up a square of gauze and presses it over Steve’s chin, taping it carefully in place before tilting Steve’s face down to get a better view of the cut on his forehead. “ ‘Course, it’d be easy for her to say since she also coulda treated me for the ulcer you’re giving me by getting beat up all the time,” he says as he wipes away the blood.

“Aw, and here I thought you liked being the knight in shining armor pulling me out of fistfights every other week,” Steve says with a grin.

“Well, even your knight in shining armor could use time off once in a while.” Bucky smooths the bandage on Steve’s forehead and leans in to get a better look at the wound on his jaw.

Their faces are side-by-side now, so close Bucky can almost feel the rumble in Steve’s throat when he says, “You should probably form a union and bargain for it, then.”

Bucky lifts the washcloth to Steve’s jaw with trembling fingers. Something about their proximity is setting off an electric burn inside of him. Steve between his knees, Bucky’s face practically on Steve’s neck, Bucky’s fingers on Steve’s sharp jawline—it’s intimate on a level even beyond their normal.

The cut on Steve’s jaw is the smallest one, and it takes Bucky no time at all to clean and dress it. When he’s done, he doesn’t pull back right away. Experimentally, he presses the pads of his fingers to Steve’s skin just behind the bandage. He feels a hint of stubble and the tackiness of drying sweat. Steve’s breath hitches slightly.

Bucky exhales through his nose and collects himself enough to huskily reply, “You got other fellas I don’t know about rescuing you from alleys?” He pulls back just enough to look Steve in the eye, keeping his fingertips on Steve’s jaw. He can feel Steve’s pulse screaming under his skin.

“No,” Steve says, voice low and eyes blown dark. “There’s just you.”

A breath passes.

Steve, because he’s always been the braver of the two of them, leans in first.

When Steve’s lips press against his, Bucky makes an involuntary sound like a soft cry from somewhere in his throat. Steve, alarmed, starts to pull away, but Bucky is already chasing after his mouth and kissing him back. He flattens his palm against the side of Steve’s neck and places his other hand on the small of Steve’s narrow back, drawing him in closer.

Steve lifts his bandaged hands to Bucky’s shoulders and just rests them there for a moment, sweetly, almost like he’s not quite sure where to put them.

And then he’s biting at Bucky’s lower lip and slipping him tongue when Bucky’s mouth falls open at the sensation, and then he’s withdrawing so he can push Bucky backwards onto the bed and clamber on top of him, and Bucky is gone, just gone, lying flat on his back looking up at Steve and thinking that it’s never, ever been like this with anyone else.

Afterwards, when their breathing is no longer so ragged and they’ve both come down from the high enough to clean up and get dressed, Bucky realizes belatedly that they’ve probably both got some explaining to do. He finishes buckling his trousers and sits back down at the head of the bed. Steve joins him, sitting at the foot.

Bucky knows that some men go with other men. It’d be hard not to know that, living in the part of Brooklyn that the two of them do. He’s even slipped out to those sorts of bars a few times himself, usually when a date with a dame went particularly disastrously and he was already a little drunk and desperate. But that’s just something he _does_ , not something he _is_ , and he doesn’t want Steve getting the wrong idea.

“I’m, uh,” Bucky begins awkwardly, and when the hell has he ever been awkward a day in his life? “I’m not a fairy, just so you know.”

“Me neither,” Steve says quickly. “I’ve only been with dames before this.”

Bucky feels an acidic bite of curiosity. “Dames, plural?” he asks, his voice pleasantly neutral. “I thought it was just Marlene from your art class.”

The tips of Steve’s ears go sweetly pink. “Helen Kominsky let me feel her up under her skirt last month,” he admits.

Bucky resists the urge to say that everyone and their grandfather’s felt up Helen Kominsky under her skirt.

“Do you reckon it was a mistake?” Steve asks.

“What, feelin’ up Helen Kominsky? Not if you washed your hands afterwards.” Damn. Maybe Bucky’s not as good at resisting his urges as he thought. At least it’s good advice, despite how much it sounds like him ragging on poor Helen.

The pink on Steve’s ears darkens straight past red all the way through to vermillion. “Oh, come off it, Buck, you like Helen,” he chides. “And besides, I was talking about—us. This. If this was a mistake.” He gestures vaguely at the rumpled bedding between them.

Bucky considers this. “Nah,” he decides. “I figure it was just two pals lettin’ off a bit of steam, y’know?” It sounds stupid even as he says it, but sometimes stupid things are true.

“Right,” Steve says, sounding relieved. “Harmless fun.”

“Harmless fun,” Bucky agrees.

Silence stretches thoughtfully between them for a moment.

“And,” Bucky adds carefully, “since all it is is harmless fun, I wouldn’t be sore about it if we did it again sometime.”

Steve says, “Me neither.”

It doesn’t happen all that often, all things considered. Bucky keeps finding them double dates, and while he never tries too hard to go home with them, some dames have no compunction about inviting him up for a cup of coffee at the end of the night, and well, what kind of man would turn that offer down? Steve keeps getting sick, often leaving him with barely enough breath in his body to walk from the bed to the bathroom, and on nights like that, Bucky curls his body around Steve’s in bed without a thought in his mind other than a pure and holy _please keep breathing_.

But sometimes Bucky strikes out with girl after girl, or he doesn’t strike out but he doesn’t like any of them even for making conversation, and he grows so feverishly bored with women that he’s practically crawling out of his own skin. Sometimes Steve’s so vibrantly energetic that no one meeting him for the first time would ever believe he was sick. Those are the times that they roll across their uneven wooden floor, fumbling with each other’s clothes and laughing into each other’s mouths, sometimes drunk, sometimes not.

It changes things, although they don’t talk about it. Bucky stops going to the queer bars, since he’s got Steve to help him scratch that particular itch now. Steve stops using Bucky as a model for his sketching practice, even though he’s been making Bucky pose for him ever since that first time when they were fifteen and sixteen. It changes things, and they pretend it doesn’t, and they never, ever talk about it.

Bucky thinks about it, though. More than he’d care to admit. Sometimes he has to chant _just two pals letting off steam_ in his head over and over like a mantra, or else his thoughts start slipping into areas he never wants to touch.

If he tries hard enough, he can almost convince himself that he doesn’t actually _like_ sleeping with Steve, it’s just something he does because it’s better than not sleeping with anyone at all. Christ knows Steve could use it, besides. Whenever Bucky offers to let Steve properly fuck him instead of just messing around with their hands and mouths, he tells himself he’s just doing Steve a favor, because Steve has such rotten luck at getting girls into bed and this is good practice for the rare times it actually happens. He ignores the small logical voice in the back of his mind shuffling its feet and muttering _why don’t you ever ask him to return the favor, then_ and _was it also a favor when you let Joe from the St. George Hotel do the same thing_?

They both know that it has to end, because men can go to each other for an occasional fuck, but you still have to find a wife to go home to at the end of the day unless you want to spend your whole life in an underworld of coded language and the threat of police raids. Even if they wanted more from each other than a casual screw, they both love the sunshine too much to chain themselves up underground like that.

They both know that it has to end, because Steve’s the best damn man Bucky’s ever known and sooner or later one of the girls they take on double dates will have her head screwed on straight enough to see it too.

They both know that it has to end, because eventually Bucky will meet a girl he likes enough to marry and that’ll be that. Even though he’s never met a dame who makes his blood rush or his heart skip the way that Steve does, that doesn’t mean there’s anything abnormal about him or that he won’t make a good husband. Based on the way his coworkers complain about their wives, he cynically suspects that most everyone gets married just because they have to.

They both know that it has to end, and then, one day, it does.

Bucky gets his draft notice the morning after his twenty-fifth birthday. Mercifully, Steve is out of the apartment that day, off on some billboard-painting job. It gives Bucky plenty of time to sit and stare at the letter, trying to formulate how he can break the news to people. He tries saying it out loud to the empty apartment a few times, but his voice keeps cracking only a few words in.

The worst part is that Steve won’t even understand. Steve tried to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor and has gone to two other recruiting offices with falsified paperwork since then. Steve will look at Bucky’s draft notice with envy and try to convince him that this is some great opportunity for him to stand up for the little guy. Bucky just thinks about dying overseas and can’t stop picturing his mother’s face.

He stands up from the couch and begins pacing around the small open space of the apartment. As he does, his eyes alight upon the gas burners of the kitchen stove. Unthinking, he twists the worn metal knob and watches the fire bloom under the iron burner.

The letter is still sitting on the couch. Bucky retrieves it and dips one corner into the blue flame. He drops it into the kitchen sink, currently dry and empty, and opens the window. The smoke carries out and up into the sky until only a nickel-sized pile of soft ashes remains.

When Steve gets home from work, Bucky tells him that he enlisted.

Steve’s smile is a little sad around the eyes, but still genuine. “Good for you, Buck,” he says, clapping him on the shoulder. “Hey, maybe you’ll see me over there soon too, huh?”

Bucky’s smile mirrors Steve’s own. “Yeah, maybe, buddy,” he says. They’re both quiet for a moment before Bucky speaks again. “You know this means we can’t be sleeping together anymore,” he begins cautiously. Saying it aloud, putting a name to what they’ve been doing, feels dangerous after more than three years of mutual silence.

Fortunately, Steve immediately jumps in to agree with him. “Right, of course. Don’t wanna get you discharged from the service or anything like that.”

“Right, right. And, you know, it was probably past time for us to stop anyway. A bit of casual fun’s one thing when you’re twenty, but I think we’re both gettin’ to an age now where we should be lookin’ for girls to settle down with.”

Steve snorts. “ ‘Gettin’ to an age now,’ ” he mutters derisively. “Geezer.”

“Twerp.”

“Jerk.”

“Punk.”

So it’s over. They don’t talk about it again.

* * *

The day after Bucky leaves for basic training, Steve wakes up with warmth at his back. For a moment, he thinks, _Bucky—_

—but when he rolls over, he realizes he left the curtains open, and now the sun is glaring onto his face instead of his back.

He doesn’t have any work lined up for the day, which leaves him with nothing to do but wander around the empty apartment. There are still little traces of Bucky everywhere: a sock he’d left under the couch despite swearing he was gonna pick it up before he left, an extra set of razor blades he’d told Steve to keep still sitting unopened on the counter, his favorite mug in the cabinet by the stove. Steve runs his fingers over the back of the sofa and remembers Bucky tipping his head back against it, a little drunk as he laughed at something Steve had said, his eyes warm and merry where they met Steve’s.

He can’t stand it.

Impulsively, with no plan in his head other than _go_ , Steve grabs his coat from where it’s folded over the back of his dining chair and heads for the door. The air outside is cold on his face, winter fighting hard not to give itself over to spring, but Steve barely registers the temperature as he walks, trying to burn off whatever agitation the memory of Bucky had sparked. His feet carry him south for nearly two hours, meandering through Prospect Park and out the other side. Finally, he comes to a stop in an unfamiliar residential area.

When he looks at the street signs, he realizes he’s in Flatbush.

Bucky once told him that when he was young, six or seven maybe, his neighbor Mrs. Brandwein had taken him and Ruth to a Dodgers game. For the first time, Steve realizes that that’s one of the only things he actually knows about Bucky’s life before the two of them met; Bucky always claims that life before Steve was so boring he barely even remembers it. Steve could be looking right at Bucky’s childhood home right now and he’d have no idea.

With a start, Steve feels a lump come to his throat. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists until it passes, reminding himself to quit being so selfish as to miss Bucky when Bucky’s off standing up for the greater good.

He wanders until he finds an automat, where he purchases a sandwich to eat as he walks home. Crowds of foot traffic flow around him, no one looking twice at him. He has not touched, has not spoken to a single person all day.

Back in the apartment, he sits on the loveseat and stares emptily out the window. Every once in a while, he used to sit here and look out at Bucky smoking on the fire escape, illuminated in the sunset, and feel something in him ache so sweet and so sad that he thought he might cry from all the love he held inside him. Whenever that had happened, he would just grit his teeth until he trusted himself not to say anything stupid.

He recalls what Bucky had said when he enlisted: _we should be looking for girls to settle down with_. It had stung, although Steve already knew that what existed between them could never be more than platonic. Bucky likes dames; Steve likes dames, although he isn’t too proud to admit that fellas can turn his head just as easily; if Steve had occasionally longed to simply hold Bucky’s hand after a hard day or kiss him without it necessarily being a prelude to anything more physical, he was careful to bottle those urges up so as not to ruin things with Bucky.

He’d had to stop drawing him, though. It was the one thing that Steve had known with absolute certainty would give him away. Even now, if he’s not careful, he ends up sketching Bucky’s face in unmistakably loving detail.

He makes sure to close the curtains before going to bed tonight.

Things get easier after that first day. Bucky sends letters from Basic along with his half of the rent. One of them says that he’s been selected for sniper training after proving to be the best shot out of the whole camp. Another one sometime after that announces that he’s been promoted to corporal, which comes with a bigger paycheck “so I can send you a little bit more money, Stevie, and don’t have to worry about you getting fired without telling me again.”

Winifred and George tell him that they’re worried about him living all alone and insist on having him over for dinner at least once a week. Dinners at the Barnes’ are always crowded—Becca’s in her first year of high school, Maggie’s graduated but hasn’t moved out yet, and Ruth married a banker last year, but even she manages to stop in when Adam’s at dinner with clients—but rather than being homey and familial, all they do is throw Bucky’s absence into even sharper relief. Steve usually makes up a reason to leave early.

By the time Bucky leaves Basic, he’s a sergeant. He doesn’t write to let Steve know about it ahead of time, just shows up at their door in his uniform and says, “That’s Sergeant Barnes to you,” when Steve shouts his name.

He tells Steve that he has a couple days of leave before he ships out to Europe and that the two of them ought to live it up in that time. “Living it up,” as it turns out, consists of springing Becca out of school—she leaps onto Bucky in a full-body hug as soon as she sees him, all four limbs wrapped around his torso—so the three of them can ride a streetcar all the way down to Coney Island.

“Now, don’t go making a habit of this, Becks,” Bucky warns her as they make their way through the crowd. “Getting an education is important, ‘specially for someone with a brain like you’ve got.”

Becca nods distractedly, her wide eyes already tracing the skeletal shapes of the rides silhouetted against the near-summer sky. “Yeah. Right. Swell,” she says, then takes off towards the ticket booth.

“You could at least pretend to listen!” Bucky calls after her before turning to Steve with a sigh.

“Yeah,” Steve says drily, gazing after Becca’s retreating dark head, “ ‘cause you were nothing like that when we were her age.”

Bucky rolls his eyes and cuffs Steve’s shoulder before following after his sister.

The next day, the two of them go to Stark Expo, and the rest is history.

* * *

Once, Steve remembers, when he was eighteen and Bucky was nineteen, he had asked Bucky if he believed in love at first sight.

Bucky had shrugged noncommittally and said, “I don’t know. For some people, maybe.”

Steve’s still not sure about love at first sight, but he’s thinking there’s a case to be made for love at first conversation. The moment Agent Carter tells him that he has no idea how to talk to a woman, Steve feels a white-hot flush of recognition radiate through his body. It’s the same feeling as he gets around Bucky: the feeling of seeing and being seen, of someone knowing exactly who he is, instantly and intimately, with barely a word spoken.

If there’s any justice in the world, he thinks, this is the woman he’s going to marry.

* * *

After the first rush of air into his newly-healed lungs, after Dr. Erskine bleeds out on the floor of his lab, after Steve is whisked off to be a dancing monkey for the masses, Steve realizes that the world’s sense of justice may not play by his personal understanding.

* * *

Steve finds that touring with the USO is an exercise in maintaining interpersonal relationships that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have happily let go by the wayside.

Burt, the actor who plays Hitler, wastes no time in letting Steve know that he considers this whole ordeal beneath him. While Steve privately agrees, Burt’s reasoning has less to do with wanting to be on the frontlines and more to do with the fact that he’s getting second billing to a non-professional. Steve quickly works out that things run smoother if he and Burt don’t talk.

The dancers warm up to him at varying rates: on the very first day, a peppy redhead named Vivian lets him know with a wink that her door’s always open if he gets lonely during the tour, while some of the other girls continue to regard him with cool suspicion even after three months of working together.

For the most part, though, the girls make good friends, as does the tour manager, Alfred. They admittedly make an odd group; Alfred is middle-aged and divorced and has thin ginger hair shot through with gray, while most of the dancers are even younger than Steve, who is. Well.

Steve is who he is now. Among the effects of the serum were improved reflexes, so he doesn’t stumble into doorframes or trip over his own lengthened legs as often as he thinks he probably should, but he’s still getting used to his bigger body. Every morning, he wakes up thinking he’s still skinny, an illusion that lasts only until he takes his first breath and remembers that he doesn’t have asthma or a heart condition or any of his other maladies anymore.

On the occasions that he does fumble with his new body, the girls are mostly understanding. Once, Betty drops an uncapped lipstick and Steve, lunging forward to catch it, underestimates his own reach and ends up knocking her legs out from under her. He apologizes profusely, but Betty is too busy laughing her head off at him to reply. When she finally gets her laughter mostly under control, she wipes at her eyes and says, “You know, I’ve heard of sweeping a girl off her feet, but…” before dissolving into a heap of giggles again.

Moments like that are one of the little ways that Steve’s friendships with the dancers make the tour bearable, despite his persistent and futile desire to do something more with Dr. Erskine’s gift. However, they’re still friendships of convenience, born out of the fact that the twenty cast members and their limited crew are the only consistent faces in each other’s lives for months at a time. Some days Steve misses Bucky so terribly that he runs through the show like he’s sleepwalking. He longs to be seen again.

It happens after a show in Milwaukee in early December.

After they’ve all changed out of costume and the cast and crew have left for various dance halls and bars, Steve is walking through the backstage area on his way out of the theater when he notices one of the girls’ helmets cast off in a corner, apparently forgotten. Knowing that Alfred will give them all hell for being careless with the costumes, he decides to return the helmet to the girls’ dressing room, figuring it’s late enough that no one will notice him going in.

When he opens the door, the room is dark, but there’s enough light from the doorway for him to make out two figures kissing in the back corner. He recognizes them as Lana and Jenny, two of the dancers who rarely speak to him. Both of them are still in costume, mostly: Jenny’s hands are on Lana’s breasts, pushing them out of her glittery vest; one of Lana’s hands is wrapped around the back of Jenny’s dark head, while the other isn’t visible from Steve’s position but, based on the noises Jenny is making, is probably located somewhere under her skirt.

Steve can’t help but let out a surprised, wordless exclamation before his brain catches up with his mouth and admonishes it to be quiet. Lana’s eyes fly open, and in an instant she’s pushing Jenny away from her and hastily shoving her costume back into place. As quickly as he can, Steve puts the helmet in its cubby and holds his hands up in a sign of surrender. “I’m just returning Macy’s helmet for her,” he says apologetically, before turning and high-tailing it out of the room.

He hasn’t gotten far when he hears dull footsteps chasing him down. He turns to see Lana, still in her stocking feet. She’s holding herself with a confidence that, while shaky, is nonetheless astonishing for a half-dressed woman with smeared makeup and messy hair who is clearly trying to convince him that she has a perfectly respectable explanation for her state. With a ferocious glare, she crosses her arms and looks up at him. “Listen, Rogers, whatever you think you saw back there—” she begins.

“It’s fine.”

“But you don’t understand—”

“It’s fine.”

“If you’re thinking about blackmailing us, I’ll—”

“Lana!” He cuts her off as gently as he can. “It’s _fine_. I won’t tell anyone.”

Lana’s mouth, still cloudy with red lipstick, opens and closes a few times as she works through this new information. “Why not?” she finally demands. “Anyone else would want us fired for this.”

Steve likes Lana, but he’s not about to tell her about him and Bucky. Instead, he shrugs and says, “I just don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Unfortunately for him, Lana is far too clever to buy such a simple explanation. She narrows her eyes at him. “That’s all?” she asks, voice heavy with implication.

Steve narrows his eyes right back. He decides to edge a little closer to the truth. “Before the tour, I lived in Brooklyn Heights,” he says. “People there are more open about their… preferences.” There. It’s out. Not all of it, not enough to incriminate him, but enough for her to draw her own conclusions.

Sure enough, Lana’s eyes widen just a fraction. She says, “Huh. Good to know, Cap.”

From behind her, a faint tremolo voice calls, “Thank you.”

Lana turns. Over her shoulder, Steve can see Jenny leaning against the doorframe, looking as though she might pass out from fear. For a showgirl, Jenny is shockingly timid offstage; Steve doesn’t think he’s heard more than a handful of words from her in all the months they’ve been touring.

Jenny continues, “I—I need this job, and if you’d told anyone, I—” She’s cut off by a crack in her voice. Even from here, a good twenty feet down the hallway, Steve can see fat tears of relief welling up in her eyes.

Immediately, Lana is rushing to her side, everything about her softer than Steve’s ever seen it. “Hey, shh, it’s alright, sugar,” she says soothingly, supportively gripping Jenny’s forearms. “It’s alright, I’ve got you.”

As Steve watches them, something in his chest aches. He turns his face away.

After that, things are different between the three of them. Whenever they can, they try to carve out spaces and times wherein they can all speak freely without fear of being overheard.

It’s in one such conversation that Lana, lying with her head in Jenny’s lap, twists her head to look up at her and asks, rather sappily, “Do you suppose we’ll still be together when we’re old and gray?”

Jenny smiles down at her and strokes Lana’s hair. “Oh, I do hope so,” she says. “I’d hate to hafta go to the trouble of finding myself a new gal.”

Steve clears his throat. “You’re planning on doing this for the long haul, then?” he asks.

Both girls turn their heads to look at him quizzically. “Of course,” Jenny says. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Well, it’s…” Steve struggles to find the right words. Even though Jenny’s twenty-one and Lana’s twenty-two, they often seem more worldly than him, and the last thing he wants is to condescend to them. “It limits your options. You can only live in certain places, go on dates at certain bars or restaurants.”

“You mean places with other queer folk, right?” Lana asks.

“Yeah.”

Jenny tugs lightly at one of Lana’s chestnut curls with contemplative fingers. “I don’t think that sounds limiting at all,” she says. “I think that sounds glorious.”

“Me too,” Lana agrees. “I mean, if that’s limiting, then what’s freedom? Having to give up the girl I love—” Jenny blushes. Lana pinches her cheek affectionately. “—and marry a man I don’t, just because I’m supposed to? Living my life as some boring housewife when I know there’s a community of people out there who are like me? Fuck that.”

Steve cocks his head at them. He says, “Huh. Maybe you’re right.”

* * *

Europe isn’t so bad, except for when it really, really is. Bucky still can’t quite wrap his head around how sometimes he can be sitting around the Italian countryside, by his estimation the most beautiful goddamn square mileage on God’s green Earth, playing cards and swapping smokes just like he would have done back in Brooklyn, and then other times that same countryside is a Gehenna of smoke and blood and the screams of the dying.

Dugan says that it’s a bit like dreaming about Rita Hayworth and getting woken up by Charles Coburn. Bucky likes Dugan. He’s not the most tactful person even by military standards, but he’s feisty and good at what he does, and it’s immediately apparent that his occasional dodgy remarks are born out of genuine ignorance rather than malice. When he finds out that Bucky’s Jewish on his ma’s side, he asks, completely seriously, if that means he’s only half-circumcized.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, “but that’s more ‘cause the mohel’s arms got tired halfway through, know what I’m saying?”

Dugan laughs, and the next time one of the men takes issue with their commanding officer being a Jew, it’s Dugan who knocks the guy into the dirt with a straight-faced, “I think Private Thompson lost his balance, Sarge.”

One day, they’re sitting around smoking and shooting the shit when Dugan asks him, “You volunteered, right, Sarge?”

“Nah. Draft. Told people I enlisted, though.”

“Why?”

Bucky wants to say _blind, dumb panic really_ , but he doesn’t. “Figured if I get killed over here, it’d make it easier on people if they think I charged into the fray willingly instead of having to be dragged kicking and screaming.”

Dugan nods. “Makes some sorta sense, I guess,” he says. “Me, I signed up two days after Pearl Harbor. Did it for the damndest fucking reason, too.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. This girl I was seeing—or trying to convince to see me—she was so ravin’ mad about those bombers that I think if she could, she woulda marched straight to Japan and coldcocked the Emperor hisself. So, being an idiot, I told her that I’d enlisted ‘cause I thought it’d impress her. And I’m not a liar, so then I had to go down and actually sign my ass up for the war.”

“Did it work?”

“Fuck no. She wrote me before I even left Basic to let me know she’d gotten engaged to some other guy.”

Bucky tries and fails to contain his laughter. Fortunately, Dugan’s chuckling along too, the year-old sore spot evidently already faded.

When Bucky’s laughter slows a little, he asks, “What was her name?”

Dugan smiles, a softer and more private thing than Bucky is used to seeing from him. “Lynn,” he says.

They smoke in silence for a while until Dugan breaks it. “What about you?” he asks. “You got a girl waiting for you back home?”

Bucky shakes his head. “Ain’t met a dame capable of tying me down yet,” he drawls, deliberately braggadocious.

Dugan snorts, muttering, “Fuckin’ cocky bastard,” affectionately as he stubs his cigarette out on the ground beside him. His face grows serious as he spots an approaching officer. “Incoming,” he warns.

Bucky pushes to his feet. The officer tells him that a Nazi battalion is approaching from the north and to prepare the men for battle.

They lose the fight. Badly.

Later, in the HYDRA base, Bucky considers Dugan’s story about Lynn. How she’d gone and fallen in love with someone else while he was away.

He doesn’t know, at first, why that part stays with him.

All the men from all the captured battalions are thrown together in cages so packed they have to sleep sitting up. Bucky quickly realizes that their only options are to either band together or tear each other apart like animals, and he does his best to guide the men towards the first option. The guards don’t let them talk while they’re working on the munitions factory line during the day, but at night, he asks the other boys for stories from before the war. _Anyone here got brothers or sisters? Where’s everyone from, anyhow?_ He shares his own stories, too, most of them about Steve and all the trouble he’s gotten them both into over the years.

“What’d you all do the day before you shipped out?” he asks one night.

One of the men from the colored division that had gotten captured alongside the 107th speaks up shyly. Bucky recognizes him as Private Gabe Jones, twenty-two years old and fresh out of college. “I took my girl Alice out walking along the Anacostia River,” he says. “She loves that river. Always says the Potomac pales in comparison. I had a ring in my pocket that I’d bought that morning, but then when we got to her favorite spot on the bank, I didn’t have the guts to do it. Didn’t want her waiting around for me in case I didn’t come back, you know?”

Bucky _hmm_ s in agreement. It’s Dugan, surprisingly, who follows up. “You regret it? Not askin’ her?” he asks.

“Every damn day,” Gabe says immediately. “If she was here right now, I’d get down on my knees in front of God and all of you and beg her to marry me. The thought that I might die over here without her knowing just what she means to me—that’s what really gets me, you know?”

“I know just what you mean,” an Englishman—Monty, Bucky’s pretty sure he called himself—pipes up from the far end of the cage. “I wouldn’t be nearly so afraid of dying if I could just hold my wife and tell her I love her one last time before it happens.”

Bucky wants to say something to keep morale up, steer the conversation in a cheerier direction, but he finds that his heart is too full to speak. Other than his mother and his sisters, he’s never in his life told a woman he loves her. Never even had the urge to. Yet somehow, he relates intensely to Gabe and Monty in this moment.

Unbidden, his mind flashes an image of Steve at him. Bucky screws his eyes shut tight, as though it’s an actual, physical vision he can block out. He sternly tells himself that it’s not the same, that things with Steve aren’t like that and never were. But ever since he’s been out here, Bucky’s brain has gotten worse and worse at listening to him, and it flashes that image of Steve again just like it shows him unwanted images of all the men he’s seen die every time he tries to sleep.

Bucky tips his head back against the metal bars of the cage as though he’s bedding down for the night. He suddenly prefers the company of dead men to the living.

* * *

Seeing Agent Carter—Peggy—again is like a blow to the ribs. Steve has to look down at himself to make sure that the serum hasn’t suddenly worn off, that his pounding heart and weak breath really are all her doing and not the familiar asthma and palpitations.

Her presence very nearly makes up for the incessant, slobbering rain that soaks through his costume the second he steps off the covered stage. If Steve had any kind of head on his shoulders, he’d tell her as much, let her know that despite the cold and damp she makes him feel warm, but he’s not Bucky and he still doesn’t know the first thing about charming women. As it is, she’s too busy in the command tent for them to speak until after the performance, when he’s too absorbed in self-pity to notice her coming up behind him.

She’s sympathetic, which is what really kills him. Everyone else, even Lana and Jenny, seems to think he’s stupid for wanting to trade fame and comfort for the battlefield. He doesn’t know how to explain to them the _want_ inside him, the churning, driving urge to help, to do _more_. It’s the same urge that got him beaten up on a regular basis before the serum. It’s the urge that made him love his ma and Bucky so much when he was nine, because he didn’t have to explain it to them.

He doesn’t have to explain it to Peggy, either. She knows, as truly and marrow-deep as Steve knows, that neither of them are being used to the full extent of their abilities, that they could both do so much more if not for the arbitrary roles they’ve been miscast in. She also knows that sometimes you just have to do what’s right, no matter what the brass and the world have to say about it.

When she tells him that she’s found a plane to fly him over Austria in direct defiance of Colonel Phillips’ orders, Steve feels a giddy rush that’s incongruous with the fear he’s been soaking in ever since he found out that Bucky is MIA. He thinks, _Oh, this is it._ She’s _it. This is how it’s supposed to be._ Like how he’d felt about Bucky, only he doesn’t have to swallow it down and hide it. With Peggy, there’s actually a chance she might feel the same way, and if she does, then they won’t have to sneak around. With Peggy, they can really, properly be together. Maybe.

Even after he makes an ass out of himself in front of her and Howard Stark, even after he goes plummeting out of the plane into the pitch-black night, he still thinks: _Maybe._

* * *

Men are taken nearly every day. The only clue to their fate is the screaming that sometimes echoes all the way down to the factory floor.

When the guards pull Bucky out of the herd, he doesn’t look back.

Lying on the table in the lab feels something like being undone. It seems to Bucky that this is the basest state of existence: no pretense, no artifice, no extraneous bullshit, just cold metal beneath him and his own voice repeating name, rank, and number like a shield and a prayer all in one.

The torture is bizarre, nothing like what Bucky’s been trained to expect. They don’t ask him for information. They do not beat him or hold him underwater. Instead, they perform—well, Bucky supposes they must be experiments, since they’re carried out by a team of men in lab coats whose leader introduces himself as Dr. Zola, but he can’t imagine what they’re actually learning.

Once, they take two tissue samples from his upper arm, but only anesthetize one of the areas before taking the samples. Once, they shock him with a cattle prod over and over and over and over until he’s shaking so bad that he can’t stop until hours later. Once, they stab his spine with a needle the size of Bucky’s forearm. They don’t bother numbing him for that one, either.

Bucky quickly loses track of time in this dark, windowless room. He thinks it’s maybe been a week since they put him on the table when they inform him—out of courtesy? sadism?—that he’s ready for the next phase of the test.

They inject him with something that burns like hellfire in his veins, and for the first time, Bucky really and truly thinks he’s about to die. Not in the abstract way that he always thinks he’s about to die out here—some hypothetical bullet will pierce his helmet, or some hypothetical bomb will detonate with him standing just a bit too close—but in a personal and specific way. He figures they’ve given him some sort of poison, and once it reaches his heart, that’ll be it for him.

As the pain reaches its zenith, all he can think is: _Steve._ It hurts too much for him to form anything more coherent. But he knows more certainly than he knows his own name that this is his last thought: _Steve._

Bucky blacks out.

When he comes to, he’s surprised to discover that he’s not dead. He’s even more surprised to discover that the room is empty. Maybe the little rat-faced doctor and his cronies figured he was a goner. Or maybe this is some new game they’re playing, and Bucky just hasn’t figured out the rules.

Regardless, he’s grateful for the time alone to think. The thought of _Steve_ comes rushing back to him first, bringing the memory of Gabe and Monty and their girls back home in its wake. He thinks about how awful it would be to die loving someone and never having told them. He thinks about how, for all the dames he’s made a show of chasing after, he’s never felt that way about any of them, not really, not deep down in his core. He thinks about Steve and his perpetually chapped lips and his sweet smiles and his rosy blushes and his soft little gasps in bed and his eyes and his voice and his laugh and—

Oh.

Of course.

Can’t run from the truth forever, as his ma always says.

Bucky is starting to feel like he’s been very stupid his entire life. Stupidity is the only explanation for how he could go this long without noticing—well, a lot of things. That for years his life has been shot through with a humming undercurrent of fear, so quiet and so subtle he didn’t even recognize it. That every time he’s fucked a woman there’s been a tiny voice inside him screaming at him to run the other way.

More than that, stupidity is the only explanation for how he could ever have thought that letting Steve go was the right thing to do. He should have fought for Steve tooth and nail, sunk his claws in deep and hissed and spat acid at anything that would tear them apart. Police raids and secrets should have been nothing next to the possibility of them not loving each other anymore.

He becomes aware that he’s started muttering his name, rank, and number again, as though trying to safeguard against the possibility of any of these thoughts spilling out through his lips. The part of him that isn’t caught up in marveling at the self-sabotaging idiocy of loving and losing Steve Rogers is still aware that he’s in a Nazi camp, and he’s a Jew, and now apparently a queer Jew at that, and he really doesn’t need to be giving any Krauts that may be listening any more incentive to kill him than they’ve already got.

Somewhere far below, he thinks he hears crashing sounds. He doesn’t care. He wants to see Steve. He wants, more than anything, for Steve to know what Bucky knows, that he’s been the goddamn sun in Bucky’s sky for years and there’s never gonna be anyone else for him.

He sees Steve, because Bucky gets what he wants only at the most inconvenient of times.

His brain hasn’t been so scrambled that he can’t recognize that the middle of an exploding munitions factory is a bad place to go confessing his love, so he settles for simply clinging to Steve’s new, weirdly giant frame as they haul ass out of there. He almost doesn’t make it when he sees Zola across a fiery chasm, almost collapses right there rather than face the doctor again. But then Zola turns and flees, and Bucky feels a sick satisfaction at that: _Good. Run, you Nazi fucker._

They make it out.

It’s a ten-hour march back to Allied territory, but they can’t afford to stop and risk being recaptured. Bucky stares at Steve the entire way, unable to believe what he’s seeing is real, unable to speak for fear of bursting the illusion. He’s pretty sure his feet are bleeding, but he doesn’t feel any pain.

They reach camp in the early afternoon. As they cross the threshold, a woman with scarlet lips and an iron jaw personally welcomes Steve back.

Bucky looks at the woman, and he looks at Steve, and he looks at the way they’re looking at each other, and he thinks about Dugan and his girl Lynn. There is an apocalypse happening in his heart.

At the bar that night, Bucky tries to swallow his hurt and his pride long enough to talk to Steve, which is difficult when Steve is actually there. For all that he’d desperately wanted to speak to Steve one last time when he was lying on that table—Christ, only twenty-four hours ago—he no longer knows what to say. How would he even start? _Hi, I know I'm the one who broke things off between us because I said we should find women to settle down with, but I just realized I've actually been hopelessly in love with you this entire time. Want to get out of here?_

Bucky has just barely managed to stumble through some mildly flirtatious banter about Steve’s uniform when the woman—Agent Peggy Carter, apparently—walks in looking dressed to kill, and any lingering hopes that Bucky had misread things between her and Steve are dashed. It’s like the two of them manage to suck all the air and light out of the room except for their own little bubble. Neither of them look twice at him, despite his best efforts.

When Peggy has left, Bucky jokes that he’s turning into Steve. Joking is easier than what he really feels like doing, which is digging his nails into the bar counter until the wood buckles and his fingers bleed. As it is, he grits his teeth so hard he half-worries that they’re going to crack.

Bucky takes another slug of whiskey and thinks of the man he used to be: beloved, magnetic, so concerned with what other people thought. It all feels a million miles away, like light from a dying star.

* * *

Steve is still trying to get over the daze of seeing Peggy in that dress when Lana and Jenny come up to the bar to say goodbye. “We’re heading back to New York tomorrow. Figured it’s the best place for two unemployed chorus girls to look for work, after all,” Jenny explains.

Steve winces. “Sorry about that. The unemployment, I mean.”

Lana, meanwhile, is looking slyly between him and Bucky. She slides in between them, turning her head so Bucky can’t see her face, and raises her eyebrows questioningly at Steve. Steve merely smiles neutrally at her in response.

It’s apparently all the confirmation Lana needs, because she mouths _Good for you_ and flashes him a quick thumbs-up before she pushes back from the bar. “Well, you and I ought to be heading out,” she says to Jenny.

Jenny nods at her and holds her arms out to Steve. “Whaddaya say, Cap? One more for the road?”

Steve stands and folds her into a hug. “You were always my favorite,” he stage-whispers to her.

Behind him, Lana cries an indignant, “Hey!” Jenny just laughs and kisses Steve on the cheek before releasing him from the hug.

Steve goes to sit back down, but before he can, Lana uncharacteristically pulls him into a hug, too. “See you in Brooklyn Heights,” she murmurs into his ear.

Steve’s arms tighten around her. He says nothing. After a moment, she pulls back and, with one last squeeze of his hand, heads for the door.

* * *

The next day, Bucky and the rest of the newly-formed Howling Commandos tag along when Steve goes to inform Colonel Phillips that he’s selected his team.

Phillips takes one look at their lineup and says, “Absolutely not.”

“You told me to pick the men best suited for the job. Here they are,” Steve says, setting his jaw stubbornly.

“I’m sorry, Captain, I didn’t think I had to clarify that I meant the men best suited to _legally do_ the job,” Phillips snarks back. “Those two—” He indicates Gabe and Jim. “—are supposed to be serving in the colored units, and _those_ two—” He points at Monty and Dernier. “—aren’t even US Army!”

Bucky is half-braced for Steve to say something rash and stupid, but to his surprise, Steve remains perfectly calm as he replies, “Sorry, sir, but we’re not under Army regulations anymore. This team is under the command of the Strategic Scientific Reserve, which allows international members such as Agent Carter, sir.”

Phillips raises an eyebrow. “They also allow integrated units?” he asks skeptically.

“Agent Carter informed me that since we are the first-ever SSR paramilitary unit, there technically isn’t any regulation against it, sir.”

Phillips barks a laugh and says, “Well, that’s good enough for me.” He signs off on the team with a twinkle in his eye.

* * *

The Commandos go through a few growing pains in their early days, many of them related to Dernier’s propensity for disregarding explosives safety and then pretending that he doesn’t understand English when one of the other men asks him to please be gentle with the boxes of grenades. Still, they quickly coalesce into a ruthlessly effective team, especially once Agent Carter is formally appointed as the liaison between them and the rest of the SSR.

Bucky does his best to hate Carter in the beginning, but it pretty quickly becomes clear that she’s both good at her job and genuinely fond of Steve. In the end, he settles for trying to ignore her visits as much as possible, which is difficult when Steve always wants to dissect the details of their interactions every time she leaves.

“D’you think my ma would’ve approved of Peggy?” Steve asks once, failing to entirely keep the dreamy note out of his voice.

Bucky sucks air in through his teeth. “I won’t lie to ya, Stevie,” he says solemnly, “I think she’da had real trouble with the English thing.”

“Monty’s English.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, “but you ain’t thinkin’ of marrying Monty.” Steve blushes so hard that Bucky knows he’s struck closer to the mark than he intended.

* * *

They spend New Year’s Eve at the dark tail end of 1943 huddled around a campfire in the backwoods of France, on their way back from a mission taking out two midsize HYDRA facilities. The fire crackles, its orange glow reflecting back from the snow all around them. Bucky watches it throw off sparks, some of them rising into the air, others falling until they land on the snow and are silently snuffed out.

“I feel like we should be telling ghost stories,” Morita says, like he always does when they’re sitting around a fire.

“Please no,” says Falsworth.

“ _Plus de fantômes_ ,” Dernier agrees.

“Anyone got any better suggestions, then?” Jim demands.

Dugan says, “ _Normal_ stories.”

Steve pokes at the fire with a stick. “I remember,” he starts, “this one New Year’s Eve when I was a kid, I forgot to close my bedroom window all the way. My ma made me go to bed at nine like always, but at midnight, I woke up and there were people singing Auld Lang Syne outside.”

“Was that the time you missed the next two weeks of school ‘cause you got pneumonia?” Bucky asks. The rest of the men chuckle.

“I don’t even remember, I had pneumonia so many times,” Steve says.

Dernier clears his throat and says in heavily accented English, “The last New Year with my wife, I took her to the sea.”

“In the middle of winter?” Gabe asks.

Dernier waves a hand. “It is where we met,” he says. “Near Biarritz. We would go in the summer, but that year, we knew she would not live that long.” His voice is rough, like it always gets when he talks about Marianne or occupied France. There are a few sympathetic murmurs, although Dernier’s wife has been dead for years and he never wants their pity anyway.

After a moment’s silence, Morita says, “New Year’s Day of ‘42 was the last time I saw my family. I’d just left med school and gone to enlist, but I went to visit my parents and my brother for the holidays first. I had to head back to San Francisco that morning, but they all got up early to say goodbye.” The look on his face is soft, almost as though he’s still seeing his family bid him farewell, but it quickly hardens. A bitter note enters his voice as he adds, “They got shipped off to Manzanar while I was in basic training.”

The unfairness of it doesn’t escape Bucky, and when he looks around the circle, he sees that it doesn’t escape any of the other Commandos, either. More than any of them, Jim and Gabe are bleeding for a government that would rather stab them again than stitch up the wound. This is the secret of the Howling Commandos that all the propaganda films and comic books miss: they’re heroes to a world that, when this is all over, would rather not take most of them back.

Bucky says, “Jesus.”

Morita says, “Yeah,” and discreetly wipes his eyes. “So,” he says, “anyone got any ghost stories?”

* * *

When they’re not on missions, they spend a lot of time in bars. Steve can’t get drunk and Bucky’s noticed that lately liquor seems to do less and less for him, too, but the other boys have a routine that starts with cheap rotgut whiskey and ends with dancing or pool or, in Morita, Dernier, and Dugan’s cases, flirting with any women present. All three courses of action typically end in similar fashion, which is to say disastrously.

Bucky doesn’t bother trying to chat up the girls at the bars anymore. He’d tried once or twice that very first night out of Austria, but he’d found that he just couldn’t put his heart into the charade. Now he politely ignores the dames, playing up his image as a haunted soldier who just wants to drink with his friends.

That isn’t to say he doesn’t have his occasional fun as well, usually by surreptitiously scanning the crowds near the end of the night until another man knowingly catches his eye. Uniformed men are safest since they both face dishonorable discharges if anyone finds out, but he does screw the odd civilian, too. He still remembers with a melancholy fondness the young French farmer who fell asleep beside him in a hayloft just outside of Lyon. There had been a hole in the roof above them, and Bucky had lain there in the silver light for hours, looking up at the night sky blanketing the world, the stars glittering brighter than they ever did in Brooklyn.

Then the other man had curled closer to Bucky in his sleep, and Bucky had felt a wave of heartbreaking tenderness crest over him. For a moment, he’d just _longed_ , not knowing if it was for Steve or for this man beside him or for some hypothetical love that didn’t come with a predetermined expiration date.

At this particular bar on this particular April night, the crowd is buzzing with excitement at the bona fide celebrities in their midst: Captain America and Howard Stark, in the flesh. They’re not showing off—insofar as Howard is capable of not showing off—but even tucking themselves into a discreet corner booth to catch up with the rest of the Commandos draws enough attention that Bucky occasionally has to shoot filthy glares at onlookers who get too close.

Howard is visiting because some higher-up has apparently decided, over a year after the team was formed, that if Captain America gets his shield, then his Howling Commandos can’t be using standard-issue equipment, either. Howard has been commissioned to custom-build them the best weapons money can buy. Bucky thinks the whole thing’s an idiotic exercise in egotism, either by Stark or by the SSR, but even he has to admit that after only a day of tinkering, Stark has managed to get his M1941 shooting smoother, straighter, and quieter than he’d previously thought possible.

He says as much to Stark, who gives him a self-assured, “What, are you surprised?” in response before regaling the group with yet more stories from the home front. Bucky isn’t sure if he likes Howard or hates him. They’ve spoken a few times over the last year, and Bucky has come away from every one of those conversations with the impression that, under the charm and flash, the man’s a mean, cynical bastard without an ounce of love for most members of the human race. Trying to figure out Howard Stark is like looking at himself, but in a funhouse mirror—some parts bloated and distended, others shrunk to nonexistence.

Gradually, the crowd thins out. Dernier loses interest first, followed by the rest of the Commandos. Around midnight, even Steve gets up to leave, citing an early briefing with Peggy and Phillips at 0600 tomorrow.

As he walks away, Bucky watches the expression on Howard’s face. Normally, Howard wears a flawless plastic smile that never reaches his eyes, but right now—right now, he looks nothing short of starry-eyed as he gazes after Steve’s retreating back.

It’s an expression Bucky knows from personal experience.

Without meaning to, Bucky bursts into hysterical laughter. Howard jolts out of his reverie and glares at him. “Something funny, Barnes?” he snaps.

Bucky waves a hand dismissively, shoulders still shaking a little. “Nah, just—your face. You look like a teenage girl seeing Cary Grant on the silver screen.” He knows he’s being brash, and he doesn’t care. He kind of hopes Howard punches him, if only because fighting Howard would probably be more fun than talking to him.

Howard doesn’t punch him. “I’d think most people would, seeing my work up close,” he replies evenly.

Bucky rolls his eyes at Howard referring to Steve as _my work_. “You telling me you get off on your own genius? Wait, don’t answer that, of course you do,” he says.

“I _really_ don’t have to sit here and take this.” Howard moves to get up. Bucky reaches out snake-fast and yanks him back down.

Howard turns back to him with pure fire in his eyes, but Bucky is unbothered. “Listen,” Bucky says, more kindly. “I’m not saying this to be an asshole. But Steve’s over the moon for Peggy, and it’ll be easier on you if you start tryin’ to move on.”

Howard looks at him, and if Bucky didn’t know any better, he’d swear the other man’s face softens by a fraction. “You speaking from experience there?” he asks, low and cautious.

Bucky shrugs. “Maybe I am.” He downs the rest of his whiskey.

Later, Bucky sits shirtless in Howard’s bed smoking a cigarette. They hadn’t had a bad time, all things considered. There’s something to be said for knowing that the person you’re in bed with is picturing someone else, too.

* * *

Towards the end of summer in 1944, the Commandos set up camp near a lake in the Alps. It’s damn picturesque, craggy gray mountains and dark trees sandwiched between crystal blue waters and sky. Bucky figures it’s a good thing that it’s beautiful, since they’re supposed to be conducting missions out of here for the next two weeks.

On their second day, Peggy visits to bring them some updated information on one of the HYDRA bases they’re targeting. Bucky always gives her and Steve space when she visits: cleaning his weapons at the edge of camp instead of by the tents, spontaneous target practice with his M1941 and everyone’s empty ration tins, methodically taking inventory of grenades and ammo even if he just took inventory that morning. Whenever he does have to walk into the command tent, he does so overly cautiously, though he doesn’t know if Steve and Peggy’s lackadaisical approach to regulations extends to screwing on the job, if they’re screwing at all. He’s never asked Steve. Even the thought makes something evil curl in his gut.

This time, Bucky distances himself by wandering down to the lake, close enough to camp that he can be found if needed, but far enough that they don’t have a direct line of sight on him. He scoops up a handful of pebbles from the shore with his left hand and plucks one out of the pile with his right. It’s about two inches across at its widest point, light gray with a jagged black stripe through the center.

Mindlessly, he hurls it at a young, slender ash tree a few meters away. The fresh bark of the tree is soft and the stone wounds it easily, leaving a pale mark behind in the wood.

He throws another stone, and another, trying to hit as close to the original mark as he can. He’s not quite as accurate with his overhand throw as he is with his rifle, but he still hits the tree every time.

He’s just refilled his handful of pebbles when footsteps crunch lightly behind him. He makes one last pitch, but he can tell the shot went wide and turns to greet his visitor without waiting to watch the stone miss the tree.

“You trying to set a record for slowest tree-cutting in history?” Gabe asks, nodding to the trunk.

Bucky shrugs with forced levity. “Maybe. You need something, Jones?”

“Naw,” Gabe replies. His demeanor is friendly, but there’s a weight to his gaze as he shifts his eyes from the trunk to Bucky. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Oh, I’m living the dream,” Bucky says wryly. “You know, if I ever make it out of this damn war, I’m gonna hafta start putting mud and rocks in all my shoes. I’m too used to it, won’t be able to walk without ‘em in there anymore.”

“I meant,” Gabe says, unaffected by his flippancy, “because Agent Carter’s here, and you don’t like her.”

Bucky turns and hurls another pebble at the tree. He can tell it gouges the bark deep. “Says who?” he asks.

“Says the fact that you start sulking like a teenager every time she comes around,” Gabe retorts mildly.

Bucky says nothing. He throws another stone.

Gabe has never been affected by his brooding silences, however, and keeps talking anyway. “You blame her, don’t you?” he says. “For—Cap. She was on the team that originally oversaw Project Rebirth, right? She’s part of the reason he’s here risking his ass instead of safe at home.”

Bucky goes still for a moment as he considers this. “Nah,” he decides. With a shrug, he throws yet another rock. “All my bitching couldn’t stop Steve’s dumb ass from lying on his recruitment papers God knows how many times and signing up to be a human lab rat on the off-chance it’d help him fight. He was gonna end up here or die trying, Carter or no Carter.”

Gabe nods. He doesn’t seem too surprised to have had his theory shot down. Gabe’s never been one to bet all his chips on a single outcome. “You jealous, then?” he asks.

Bucky does not have to school his features in response, because Bucky is very, very practiced at not letting his icy inner terror rise to the surface in the first place. He maintains his expression and posture exactly, no more or less tranquil than he had been before Gabe spoke.

It clearly works, because Gabe’s tone remains unbothered as he continues, “I mean, I know the Captain’s your best friend and all, but whenever he and Carter are makin’ eyes at each other, it’s like the rest of us might as well not even exist. Makes sense you might feel sidelined.”

Bucky snorts at the word _feel_. “Why’re you trying to get me to talk feelings, anyhow?” he asks.

“Ain’t trying to do anything ‘cept make sure your problem with Carter isn’t one that’s gonna cause problems for all of us,” Gabe says, placid as ever.

Bucky knows he could pull rank on Gabe right now, tell him that only one of them is an officer here and it sure as hell isn’t a private’s job to take charge of unit cohesion, but he doesn’t. That’s not how things have ever worked with the Commandos, not really. Here, anyone who sees a need fills it to the best of their ability, and if Gabe is worried that Bucky will pose a threat to the group, Gabe is damn well within his rights to do something about it.

He relents. “I ain’t gonna be insubordinate or mistrustful of her, if that’s what you’re saying. I don’t got a problem with _her_ at all,” he admits. “Not really. She just… reminds me.”

“Reminds you of what?”

_Of how I missed my chance. Of the fact that you’re right, I am jealous, wild with it, enough to scratch my own eyes out and tear my tongue to ribbons, only I can’t admit it because it’s too risky, a gateway to a much more dangerous truth. Of—_ “Of Steve. How he’s finally got everything I ever wanted for him,” he says, “and instead of being happy for him, I’m here throwin’ rocks at trees.”

Gabe considers him for a moment before holding his hand out. “May I?” he asks.

Bucky blinks, then proffers his left hand, a few rocks still cradled in his sweaty palm.

Gabe selects one and examines it, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger contemplatively. “You know,” he says, “my first semester at Howard, I was absolutely miserable. And I couldn’t make sense of why, ‘cause it was all I’d wanted for as long as I could remember.” He tosses the rock up in the air and catches it. “I think when you want something for that long, you build up this idea in your head of how it should feel and how it should look. Maybe you don’t even notice you’re doing it. But then when it actually happens, the universe isn’t beholden to the version you dreamed up—” He throws the rock at the tree, hard and fast, chipping off a bit of bark that had survived between two pocks left by Bucky. “—and it’s, I don’t know, jarring.”

“Yeah?” Bucky says. “What’s your prescription then, doc?”

Gabe smiles at him, a little sadly. Bucky is struck by the feeling that Gabe understands him better than either of them will admit out loud. “Just gotta wait it out, I’m afraid,” Gabe says. “Like sea glass, you know? All the rough bits will wear away eventually.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, and after a moment, Gabe turns and heads back towards camp, calling over his shoulder to be back in an hour.

He thinks about sea glass. He’s not sure if the glass is him or Steve, but he tries to picture it: a future with all their rough edges smoothed out. Steve and Peggy could flirt and fall in love and get married and Bucky could watch it all happen without his every breath turning to white-hot agony in his chest. When people listen respectfully as Steve speaks, Bucky could listen along instead of fighting the urge to scream at them that for fifteen years he was the only fucking person who saw how good Steve was and how dare they act like they would have given him the time of day before the serum.

When he imagines that future, the one where he’s not so selfish, something about it sets his teeth on edge. It’s beautiful, but it’s beautiful in the way of _The Wizard of Oz_ , lit by stage lights instead of the sun, its hues all overbright cherry-reds and painted-on greens. It’s not the sort of place he could actually live in, because it’s not real. Dorothy always has to go home to Kansas in the end.

It could never work, because it would require Bucky to be as disciplined and kind and _good_ as he was before the war. Before the men he’s seen die and the revelation on a steel table. He’s not good at being that person anymore, or at being a person, period.

Sometimes he thinks that he’s rotting from the inside out. That if anyone were to push too hard on his hollow paper skin it’d cave right in and all they’d see inside him is a grave, black and loamy and ragged-edged.

* * *

In February of 1945, he falls from a train, and his last thought before the darkness hits is: _Steve._

* * *

The year before, after Monty had a close call with a Nazi frag grenade, all of the Commandos had written letters to their loved ones to be delivered upon their deaths. Bucky had written one to his parents and sisters, one just for Becca ‘cause she’d always been his favorite, and one for Steve. He’d handed it to Steve with a grin that almost reached his eyes and said, “Now keep that safe for me, understood?”

“You got it,” Steve had said.

After a pause, Bucky had said, “What, you don’t have a letter to give me?”

“I do,” Steve had said, “but I’m holding onto it ‘cause I don’t trust you not to open it.” And Bucky had laughed and said that was fair.

Steve doesn’t actually read the letter until Bucky’s been dead almost sixteen hours. There’s Zola to hand over. Reports to write. Showers to be taken. News to break to everyone at headquarters. Steve walks numbly through it all. He doesn’t even remember the letter until Dugan reminds him and leads him to a bombed-out pub he’d found.

“Figured it’d make a good place to read it,” Dugan says from the half-collapsed doorway. His voice is so uncharacteristically gentle that it makes Steve want to scream. “Private, like. And there’s still scotch under the bar.” With that, he leaves Steve alone.

Steve crumples into a chair that is somehow still standing. He feels almost sick as he opens the envelope and removes the letter, knowing that whatever is written inside is the last thing Bucky will ever say to him.

He unfolds it and is confronted with Bucky’s familiar penmanship, scrawled yet lovely.

_Stevie,_

_I hope like hell you’re the one reading this, cause if not, we’re both about to get in a whole heap of trouble. Well, you are. I’m dead. So I guess maybe I should start by saying to any officers who might be reading this that everything I’m about to write was completely my fault, sir, so go ahead and blame me because I’m dead and don’t care if I get stripped of my rank, but please don’t punish Captain Rogers. And Steve, I know you’ll protest that, try to defend me, but don’t bother. It’s only right for me to take the blame seeing as I’m the one responsible for fucking everything up between us the past few years._

_This isn’t fair of me, the things I’m about to say without giving you a chance to respond, but I’m a selfish man at heart and I can’t bear the thought of dying without you ever knowing the truth but I’m too cowardly to say it to your face. So here’s my compromise, and maybe it’ll hurt you worse than either of the other two options but it’s the only one I can bring myself to follow through on._

_When I was on that table thinking I was gonna die in some shithole Nazi lab, I realized that I’d had my priorities all wrong. For so long, I was scared to admit that I loved you, because loving you would make me—not normal, I guess. And it wasn’t until I went through perdition and out the other side that I realized I should have been scared of the fact that being normal would mean not loving you. I lay there on that table and I thought,_ I shouldn’t have told Steve we should just be a casual fuck. I should have fought for us. _And I thought,_ I wish he was here. Not for real, but like a ghost in a story, just here enough for me to talk to him one last time. I wish he was here so I could tell him.

_Except you actually showed up, didn’t you, and pulled me up out of Hell like some kind of redeeming angel, and I marched all night back to camp with cuts all over my feet and I didn’t feel a thing ‘cause all I could do was stare at you._

_And then we get back to camp and there’s this knockout dame coming up to you, and it takes me all of about two seconds to see you two are crazy for each other._

_When I think about it too long, it almost seems like a joke, me finally getting my head far enough out of my own ass to realize that I’m in love with you right when you’ve gone and fallen in love with the only woman on the planet who’s good enough to be worthy of you and smart enough to love you back. I guess it is kinda funny. Sometimes you’ve gotta laugh or else you’ll start crying, ya know?_

_I hope you know I don’t resent either of you. Really, I don’t. I want the two of you to survive this war. Be together. Maybe name a kid after me, though I get it if you’d rather not name your firstborn after your dead queer friend who used his goodbye letter to write the words it was too late to say properly. Sorry I don’t have something more comforting to offer up here, but hey, I’m dead. I deserve the last word, don’t I?_

_Yours,_

_Bucky_

Steve realizes that at some point he’s stopped breathing. He forces himself to inhale carefully, slowly, deeply, just like he would when trying to catch his breath after an asthma attack.

His eyes flick back to _I’m in love with you_. To _I should have fought for us_. To _I wish he was here so I could tell him_.

When he exhales, it’s shaky on the dismount.

_I’m in love with you. I should have fought for us. I wish he was here so I could tell him._

Steve puts his head in his hands and sobs.

Two days later, Captain Steven Grant Rogers puts a plane down in the Arctic ice with a photo of Peggy on the dashboard and a letter tucked in the inner left breast pocket of his uniform.

* * *

When Steve awakens in New York in 2011, he’s told that he needs to keep his identity secret from the public until SHIELD can sort out the legal and PR issues that arise when an American icon returns from the dead after six and a half decades. That lasts for all of six months before the Chitauri invasion unmasks him to the world again.

The first thing he does is visit Peggy in her nursing home.

She cries when she sees him, to which Steve says, “Aw, Pegs, do I look that bad?”

Then she’s laughing through her tears, and she says, “You look just the same. A damn sight better than me, I’m sure.”

“You look perfect,” Steve tells her sincerely. “I’d marry you in a heartbeat if it weren’t for that ring on your finger.”

Peggy looks down at her wedding band as though she’d forgotten she’s wearing it. “Oh, yes,” she says, twirling the gold band around her finger. “He passed last year, but I haven’t yet found the strength to take it off.”

“He musta really been something, if he was good enough for you to marry him.”

“He was,” Peggy says with a smile. “But more importantly—” She pushes herself carefully out of the sturdy armchair she’s been sitting in and holds a hand out to him. “—I believe you owe me a dance.”

One of the nurses plays a Vera Lynn song from her phone, and the two of them sway in time, Peggy’s frail, papery body against his. When visiting hours are over, he promises he’ll come back to see her as soon as possible. She says, “I’ll hold you to that this time,” with a smile that’s half wry and half tragic.

He goes to see Morita next. As soon as he opens his door and sees Steve, he says, “Took you long enough. News says they unfroze you six months ago, so where the hell have you been?”

“Was told to keep a low profile for a little bit,” Steve replies as he steps into the warm oak entryway of Jim’s daughter’s house in Saratoga.

“Since when are you a rule-follower?” Jim snarks. He leads Steve through the house, passing his wife along the way, and shows him out to the back deck, which overlooks rolling orchards and the distant city lights of what used to be the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

They sit under the shade of a pergola laden with purple wisteria blossoms. Jim pulls out a smartphone. He’s quite adept with it, using it to show Steve pictures of his family: wife—who he explains is normally friendly, but wanted to give the two of them time to catch up—and daughter and son-in-law and three grandchildren and a brand-new baby great-granddaughter.

After the photos have run out, he tells Steve about everything the Commandos have done since the end of the war. Steve laughs the hardest at Jim’s story about getting asked about his thoughts on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell during a CNN interview, which had led to him snapping at the hapless anchor, “For God’s sake, when you’re in a foxhole, all you’re thinking about is having your buddies’ backs, not whether or not the guy next to you spent the night before sucking co—”. At this point, Jim claims, viewers at home saw the screen cut mid-word to a cheery title card depicting a cartoon electrician alongside the words “WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES.” Steve needs a couple of minutes to recover after that one.

Jim tells him that if he thinks that’s funny, just wait until he hears the one about Gabe getting arrested at a civil rights protest and Dugan driving down to DC to bail him out, only to piss off the cops at the front desk so much that he got thrown in with the protestors instead.

He tells Steve about holidays and firstborns, about road trips and reunions, about birthdays and weddings and funerals. Mostly funerals, in recent years.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says.

Jim shrugs. “Don’t be. We all had good long lives. We just thought it was too bad that you and Barnes didn’t.”

Steve says nothing.

“Speaking of Barnes,” Jim says after a moment, “we all kept in touch with his whole family after the war. They always spoke real highly of both of you.”

Steve forces a smile. “That so?” he says.

“Yeah,” says Jim. “Of course, his parents and two of his sisters are gone now, but the youngest one, Rebecca, she’s still kicking around upstate New York.” Steve can feel Jim watching him carefully. When he doesn’t say anything, Jim adds, “So what I want to know is: what are you doing here in California when she’s just a few hours up the interstate from you?”

Steve smiles weakly again. “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t know her address?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Steve sighs and looks out at the green and gold patchwork hills, their shadows deepening by the minute. “Do you have any memories you’re afraid to disturb?” he asks. “Not ‘cause they’re bad or anything, it’s just that they mean so much to you that you’re afraid that going back would ruin them. Bucky and his family—they’re like that to me. It’s easier to leave them all untouched.”

“Yeah, but you’ve never been one to take the easy way out,” Jim says. “And besides, Becca’s not a memory yet. She’s still a person. And I know for a fact she wants to see you.”

It’s unfair, maybe. Jim certainly knows that Steve won’t be able to consciously let Becca down. But Steve’s also been unfair by avoiding her.

The light is a rich golden-red now, sunset painting the sky. Jim’s daughter and her husband come home from work and introduce themselves to Steve. They feed him dinner and ask how he’s adjusting to the modern world. They tell him that their guest room is always open to him. Steve politely declines and takes a red-eye home.

The day after he gets back to New York, he drives his bike up to Becca’s house in Rochester. It’s a little blue colonial with white trim and a glass-enclosed porch, sagging slightly but still dignified.

Just outside her door, he hesitates. Besides the memories he’s about to disturb, he’s felt a creeping dread at the knowledge that this is the last stone left to overturn from his old life. The Commandos, other than Jim, are dead. Howard is dead. Lana and Jenny are dead, though Lana’s grand-niece had filled him in on their lives as Broadway chorus girls. When he knocks on this door, the last undisturbed piece of Steve’s past will fall away.

He knocks. From somewhere deep in the house, Becca shouts that she’ll be there in a second.

As soon as the door opens, it’s like no time has passed at all. Becca leaps on him in the same four-limbed hug she’d given Bucky the last time Steve saw her, and suddenly she’s fifteen again despite the gray hair and the finely wrinkled skin like soft leather. Steve laughs and hugs her back gently until she says, “For fuck’s sake, Steve, I’m not made of glass, now give me a proper hug,” and he tightens his grip.

At last, he lowers her back to the floor and Becca steps back, looking him carefully up and down. She says, “You know, even though I saw the photographs and newsreels, whenever I thought of you, I still just pictured my older brother’s skinny little friend.”

“I still feel like that sometimes,” Steve admits.

Becca shrugs. “Of course you do. I still feel fifteen sometimes.”

She brings him to the kitchen. When she asks if he wants anything to eat, she sounds exactly like Winifred on the day he met Bucky, and Steve finds that he has to swallow hard before saying that just coffee is fine, thanks.

“So,” he says when she sets a steaming cup down in front of him, “tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Everything.”

She tells him that she put her big brain to use just like Bucky told her to and studied engineering at NYU on a full scholarship. She tells him that she’s divorced, but it’s amicable, and she still sees her ex-husband around town sometimes. She tells him that Ruth and Adam had three kids and Maggie, who started going by Margaret as an adult, had seven. They both wanted to name their firstborn sons James, but in his letter to Becca, Bucky had specifically told her that Steve had first dibs on the name, then her, then Maggie and Ruth. “Margaret was _pissed_ about that,” Becca laughs. “I had to show her the letter to prove it. When I had Edmund and decided to make James his middle name, she told me that didn’t even count as using it.”

“What did you say?” Steve asks, laughing as well.

“That our parents might have been cruel enough to name a child after President James Buchanan, but I sure as hell wasn’t.”

When their laughter dies down, Becca reaches over and squeezes his hand, her grip still steady and firm despite her age. “I still miss him terribly, you know,” she says quietly. “I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.”

Steve rubs his thumb over the papery skin on her knuckles. “People act like everything I did is all ancient history,” he admits. “They don’t remember that for me, it was only six months ago.”

“Oh, yes, that too,” Becca says, as though she’d just remembered it herself. “But also…” She trails off meaningfully.

Steve stares blankly at her, unsure of what she’s trying to say.

Becca purses her lips. When she speaks next, she does so thoughtfully, as though she’s picking her way over a floor scattered with broken glass. “I don’t know exactly what you and my brother were to each other. Over the years, I’ve had my—suspicions, I suppose you could call them, or guesses. But whatever was between you two, I could tell even as a teenager that it was the kind of thing you don’t ever get over.”

Steve can’t tell if he’s breathing.

After he fails to respond, Becca squeezes his hand again. “You don’t have to say anything,” she assures him. “I only mean that you don’t have to pretend to be more okay than you are. Now, let me get you a refill.”

She picks up his mug and is halfway to the coffee pot when Steve finally finds his voice. “Becca,” he says.

She turns and looks at him.

“Thank you.”

* * *

A year after New York, Steve, Natasha, and Clint are called in to take care of some wannabe supervillain who’s trying to trash San Francisco with a giant mutant alligator. Bruce is on standby as the team’s resident expert in all things giant and mutant, but he proves unnecessary: Natasha quickly realizes that the alligator is receiving electric shocks forcing it to attack, and as soon as she destroys the transmitter, the alligator quickly calms down and allows itself to be sedated.

On the jet home, Bruce takes a seat next to Steve. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Cap,” he says with a smile that seems hesitant more out of habit than anything else.

Steve returns the smile and says, “Moved to DC. SHIELD’s been keeping me busy.”

“You like working there?”

Steve shrugs. “It’s familiar. Similar to what I did with the Commandos. Different tech, different targets, but still.”

Bruce’s eyebrows knit together. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, then closes it. Steve nudges him. “What’s that face for?”

When Bruce speaks, he sounds like he’s choosing his words very, very carefully. “How old are you, Cap?” he asks. “And don’t say ninety-five, ‘cause that’s a technicality and we both know it. How many years has it been from your perspective?”

Steve smiles in the way he always does when he knows he’s been made. “I was twenty-six when I went into the ice. I got defrosted eighteen months ago. I was frozen in February and thawed out in September, so my age doesn’t exactly line up with my birthday anymore, but…”

“But practically speaking, you’re about twenty-eight,” Bruce concludes. “And you were, what, twenty-three when you joined the Army?”

“Twenty-three, twenty-four, thereabouts. Depends on whether or not you count the time I spent in tights.”

He says it as a joke, but Bruce doesn’t laugh, just looks at him with something raw and sad in his eyes. “You’re so _young_ ,” he says.

Steve fights the urge to squirm under Bruce’s gaze. “Is that a problem?” he asks, trying not to sound like he’s looking for a fight.

“No, but… when I was your age, I was just finishing up grad school and trying to get my landlord to fix the plumbing in my shower. I hope you don’t feel like you have to be a soldier your whole life, is all.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. He keeps turning Bruce’s words over in his mind long after they part ways.

A year later, when he meets Sam, he thinks of Bruce again. Sarah would have said that the universe is trying to tell him something, sending messengers to reinforce the nagging voice in his head telling him it’s time to stop being a soldier. Steve just thinks of Sam’s voice calling out to him, “It’s your bed, right?” and, for the first time in a very long time, feeling the warmth of being known.

A few days after he meets Sam, the universe apparently decides that subtle hints aren’t working and burns SHIELD to the metaphorical ground.

* * *

In some ways, Steve thinks he’ll always be in this moment: standing in the wreckage of a freeway, pulse screaming in his ears, skin clammy from shock. The world ends, everything crumbling save for him and the figure in black and the few dozen feet between them.

_Bucky?_

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

* * *

Once the Internet starts combing through the SHIELD-slash-HYDRA files, it doesn’t take long before people stumble onto files referencing “the Asset.” The picture that emerges is even uglier than Steve had feared: electroshock, hypnosis, starvation, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, chemical castration, stabbings, beatings, gunshot wounds left to heal on their own. Everything that made Bucky a person, _any_ person, stripped away with surgical precision until he was too broken to resist. To know that he _could_ resist.

Ten days after the leak, someone assembles the Asset files, as they’ve come to be known, in chronological order. The very first one, penned by Arnim Zola himself back in 1945, mentions recovering the Asset from a ravine in the Alps. From there, it’s not hard for people to come to the right conclusion.

When the story breaks on Twitter and the front page of every newspaper in the country, Steve uses his new burner phone to call Becca from Sam’s house, where he’s been staying ever since the hospital.

As soon as she picks up, he starts, “Have you seen—”

She immediately cuts him off. “Is it true?” she asks.

“Yes,” Steve whispers, gripping the phone so tight he has to consciously will himself not to shatter it. “I’m—Becca, he didn’t even know his _name_.”

Becca’s voice shakes when she replies, “You bring him home, you hear me? Even if he never remembers. Bring him home so he can be—be safe and loved again.”

“I will,” Steve promises. “Becca, I’m so sorry. We looked for him after he fell, but we figured the river—”

“It’s not your fault,” Becca says. “He shouldn’t have survived any of this. But he did, and now it’s time for him to come home.”

“Becca—”

She hangs up on him.

He stares at his phone for a moment, then calls Jim to have an almost identical conversation.

When he hangs up, Sam is watching him expectantly, a duffel bag already slung over his shoulder.

“You don’t have to come with me—” Steve starts for the hundredth time.

“Dude,” Sam interrupts. “You know I’m in this with you. Quit trying to talk me out of it.”

Ordinarily, Steve would smile at that, but he’s still feeling too raw from talking to Becca and Jim. His voice is barely more than a whisper. “What if you were right the first time?” he asks. “What if I can’t save him?”

Sam shrugs. “What if you can?”

* * *

The Asset moves—

No.

The Soldier—

No.

Barnes—

No.

_He_ moves silently through crowds and empty streets, cities and hamlets, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, metal hand jammed into the pocket of his hoodie.

It’s funny, though. When he steals the cap from the display rack, his hand moves first to one with a Giants logo before diverting, as if with a mind of its own, to a Dodgers cap instead.

* * *

They chase Bucky for over a year. His movements are wide-ranging, a breadcrumb trail spaced out over several continents. This is not to say they don’t follow a clear design, however. The SHIELD leak had exposed HYDRA operations worldwide, and what little remains of the organization has gone to ground. Sam and Steve work to pluck out those final vestiges like weeds, guided to them by conspicuous sightings of a man with a metal arm, rumors of HYDRA bases that all trace back to a long-haired American, or, once, a handwritten note taped to their hotel room door.

Sam cautions Steve against reading too much into Bucky’s motivations, but it’s impossible for either of them not to theorize.

“It’s obvious he wants HYDRA eliminated,” Sam says over drinks and poker in a Serbian hotel, “but if that’s the case, why not just take them out himself?”

“It’s hard for a dog to turn on its master. Maybe he’s still shaking their programming,” suggests Nat, who hadn’t bothered telling them that she was in the area before showing up in their room with a bottle of vodka. “Or, hell, maybe he’s got plans we haven’t figured out yet.”

“Or maybe he’s just tired of killing,” Steve says.

* * *

He makes a habit of rolling the name around in his head, on his tongue. A few times, when he’s absolutely certain he’s alone, he even tries whispering it into the silent dark.

_Barnes. James. James Buchanan Barnes._

_Bucky._

_That’s my name._

The more he says it, the closer he comes to believing it.

* * *

“I’m only going to ask you this once,” Sam says in a Kazakh café, “and whatever answer you give me, I won’t question it.”

Steve indicates for him to go on.

“Were you and him more than just friends?”

Steve sips his coffee and tries to mentally pick apart what details feel the least like offering up his own heart. Not Bucky’s letter. Not the way he’d ached for Peggy and Bucky in equal measure. Not any of the fumbling, heated kisses in their shared apartment.

He says, “Sort of. It was complicated,” and doesn’t elaborate.

* * *

Sleep is a terrible and wondrous thing. On missions, he wasn’t allowed to sleep. Extensive testing had found that the Soldier remained ninety-eight percent functional even after a week without sleep. The two percent dip in effectiveness was deemed to be within acceptable parameters.

Now, he understands why his handlers discouraged sleep. It brings dreams. Memories. He knows that this is his brain repairing itself from the years of memory wipes. Every time he sleeps, more and more images come flooding back to him. Blood spattered on his hands, on concrete, on sand, on snow. Stars seen through a hole in a barn roof. A girl glimpsed from behind through a crowd, a rollercoaster rising up into the sky behind her. The man on the bridge. Captain Steven Rogers. Steve. Stevie.

He dreads sleep. He longs for it. He hates his dreams, his memories, the unasked-for knowledge that they burden him with. He desperately wants to know more.

Most of the time, he wakes up crying. Or screaming.

* * *

In Helsinki, Steve thinks he sees Bucky ahead of him on a crowded street. When he turns a corner, the man has vanished.

* * *

He is so very good at running.

He is so very tired of it.

* * *

In the end, they don’t catch him.

He walks to them in the middle of a crowded marketplace under a summer sky in Belarus, hands open in a gesture of trust.

He says, “Steve.”

* * *

Within a week, it becomes clear that staying at Sam’s house isn’t going to work out.

It’s small, for one, which means there’s nowhere for the sound or violence to go when Bucky has an episode in the middle of the night. Steve talks him down and spends the next day patching fifteen separate holes in the plaster walls.

For another, it’s, well, _Sam’s_. He deserves a place of his own after dropping his entire life for fourteen months to help out Steve.

More than anything, though, it’s just not home. Not that Steve has a good sense of what that means anymore—his old apartment in Dupont Circle had been pre-furnished, just a place for him to sleep in between missions. When he moved out after being released from the hospital, all of his personal belongings had fit in three boxes.

Now that Bucky’s here, now that he doesn’t have a mission, Steve is starting to remember what it’s like to actually _live_ somewhere. He doesn’t want to just fuck off and leave Sam after all Sam’s done for him, but at the same time, it’s becoming clear that there’s not much left tying him to DC.

Steve goes home.

* * *

There’s little left of the Brooklyn they knew. Their old haunts are gone or unrecognizable: Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo now rich and gentrified to hell and back, Sands Street now a set of asterisk-shaped housing towers.

They end up in Boerum Hill, close enough to home that it feels familiar, but still separate. Tony is just across the bridge in Manhattan, but he doesn’t offer to help them find a place and Steve doesn’t ask; although a congressional inquiry and subsequent federal pardon had declared that Bucky was not responsible for his actions as the Winter Soldier, Tony had let Steve know in an uncharacteristically clipped text that he still needed time to process the truth about Howard and Maria.

Their combined decades of back pay allow them to easily afford a place nicer than they’ve ever had, a three-bedroom with big multi-pane windows and high whitewashed walls. Every room is full of light. Soon enough, they’re full of other things, too—antique bookshelves stuffed with recommended reading, soft furniture that doesn’t creak and wobble when they sit on it the way their old loveseat always did, mismatched thrift-store end tables covered in magazines and records and an inexplicable set of novelty coasters from Clint. Tony, in a gesture of goodwill, gives them both laptops that he promises can’t be hacked or traced; everyone is understandably a little jumpy about cybersecurity ever since Project Insight.

They buy two enormous mattresses, and Bucky, after an incredible amount of thought and deliberation, even picks his own bedframe and blankets. They have their own bedrooms for the first time since they were living in Sarah’s old apartment. Steve pretends he’s happy about that.

Steve quietly informs the rest of the Avengers that, like Bruce and Thor, he only wants to be called in for the truly vital missions from now on. They take it well.

Without jobs, without missions, their lives have no routine. They drift through days like motes of dust in a sunbeam, aimlessly floating. Steve lets Bucky lead the way as much as possible.

He makes choices. Some happen easily, mostly those he had practice making while on the run from Sam and Steve: what to eat, when to sleep, when and how to trim his still-long hair. Other decisions, like the bedroom, take hours or days, no matter how seemingly mundane. Once, he asks Steve with evident frustration, “But what am I supposed to do when I don’t remember what I would have done before?”

Steve replies, “It doesn’t matter what you would have done before. What matters is what you want to do _now_.”

Steve would be lying if he said that the holes in Bucky’s memory weren’t distressing, though. He remembers more than Steve could have ever hoped, but there doesn’t seem to be any consistency to _what_ he remembers. He can describe their old apartment exactly, the brass _3A_ bolted to the door, the color of the walls, the precise location of the warped floorboard that always creaked like the devil in the winter, but his favorite song plays on the radio without a hint of recognition. When he closes his eyes, he says he hears his mother’s voice as clearly as if she were standing right beside him, but he doesn’t remember what she looked like except for her eyes. Becca calls Steve every day to ask if Bucky is still safe, but when Steve tells him who’s on the line, the name means nothing to him for weeks, until suddenly it does.

“I had three sisters,” Bucky says over breakfast one morning. “Ruth, Margaret, and Rebecca.”

“You did,” Steve confirms.

“Becca’s the one who’s been calling to check on me.”

“She is,” Steve says. “We could go visit her, if you’d like.”

Bucky says, “Okay.”

* * *

As they approach Rochester, he starts to feel increasingly apprehensive. A small part of him whispers that Becca deserves better than to see him like this, a hollowed-out imitation of the brother she’d known. But another part of him, one that grows larger and stronger every day, remembers that she had called Steve every day that he’d been back in the States and all she ever asked was if he was safe, not if he was the same. So he tamps down his unease and follows Steve without complaint up the walk to the house.

When she opens the door, Becca bursts into tears. His concern must show on his face, because she quickly waves her hands and says, “Ignore me, ignore me. Oh, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.” She reaches out and then quickly pulls back, an abortive little gesture that it takes him a moment to read.

“It’s okay,” he says, a little awkwardly. “You can.” And then she’s hugging him, her face pressed wetly into his shirt. He raises his right hand and rests it lightly on the back of her head, not quite returning the hug, not quite staying out of it.

Becca wipes her eyes as she pulls away. “Shit, we’re letting all the air conditioning out,” she says with a damp laugh.

“Don’t fucking cuss,” Bucky says automatically.

When he leaves, she hugs him again. This time, Bucky hugs her back.

* * *

The more Bucky remembers, the more he realizes how _wrong_ Steve has been acting. Steve, who has always been so roughly, sloppily physical, is so gentle with his touches now. It crushes him. He longs to be clapped on the shoulder and hauled in close as though nothing has changed.

“You never touch me anymore,” he says, leaning against the kitchen counter.

Steve freezes halfway through making coffee, and Bucky abruptly realizes his mistake. They haven’t talked about what they used to be, on Bucky’s part because it skirts too close to feelings he’s still in the process of remembering, and on Steve’s part because, presumably, bringing it up would violate his moral code in some way.

“I don’t mean—I remember we used to sleep together before the war. That’s not what I’m talking about,” Bucky adds quickly. “I just mean you treat me like I’m delicate.”

Steve’s shoulders visibly relax, though he doesn’t turn around. “Sorry,” he says, and his voice is genuinely apologetic. “I guess I figured that after decades of getting manhandled without your consent, you would be pretty sick of other people touching you.”

Bucky shrugs. “Most people, sure. But not ones I really care about.”

Steve looks over his shoulder and smiles at that. From then on, he’s not so cautious about letting their hands or shoulders brush when they walk past each other.

* * *

After a few months, Steve starts drawing again. He’s years out of practice any way you look at it, but the light in their apartment is good and he can afford better materials than before, and soon enough he’s almost as proficient as he was before the war.

He doesn’t set out to draw Bucky, but his face finds its way into the pages of Steve’s sketchbook anyway.

* * *

Every other weekend, Steve drives down to Alexandria to see Peggy, a ten-hour round trip that usually sees him stumbling back in the front door around midnight.

He’s just gotten back from one such trip in late November when he notices a light on in the living room. It isn’t unheard of for Bucky to be stricken with the occasional bout of insomnia, but Steve nevertheless walks down the hallway on silent feet, breath held.

Bucky is curled in a chair under a warm yellow pool of lamplight, frowning at the book in his hands. Steve lets out the breath he was holding and sinks down onto the couch. “Hey,” he says.

Bucky doesn’t react, just keeps frowning at the book like it’s written in hieroglyphics. Steve glances at the cover: one of his many biographies that publishers have felt the need to send to him, for some reason. He usually makes at least a polite attempt to read them when they arrive, but, with few exceptions, he typically has to put them down less than fifty pages in.

The one Bucky is holding is one of those exceptions, a thick hardcover that Steve had appreciated for focusing as much on the Commandos as it did on Steve himself. He’s about to ask Bucky what the problem is when Bucky beats him to the punch.

“This book is nonfiction, right?” Bucky asks without looking up.

Steve considers how to respond. “Well, yeah,” he says carefully, “but it’s still a second- or third-hand account, so they might not have gotten everything exactly right. Is there something in there that you remember differently than how they describe it?”

Bucky hands over the book and points at a sentence midway down the page. After a questioning glance, Steve reads aloud, “ _Where Rogers was seen as the more questionable member of the pair, Barnes’ prewar reputation was glowing. Friends and neighbors described him as handsome, charming, and gentlemanly, albeit a bit of a tomcat. Says McCullough: ‘Oh, Barnes certainly liked his women, but—’_ ”

“I didn’t, though,” Bucky interrupts. “I just pretended to. I didn’t actually like them the way I liked men.”

Steve says, “Oh.”

“That’s okay nowadays,” Bucky says defensively. “I read about it online.”

Steve rouses himself out of his stunned silence, afraid that his reaction has come across as non-acceptance. “Of course it’s okay,” he says quickly. “I was just surprised because I didn’t know that about you, that’s all. I mean, obviously you and I…” He trails off. Finishing the sentence ( _were together? screwed?_ ) feels too loaded, and the insinuation is enough for Bucky to know what he’s talking about anyway. “…but I always liked women just as well as men, and I guess I assumed that you did, too.”

Bucky’s thoughtful frown deepens. “Did we never talk about who we liked?” he asks.

“We never talked about a lot of things back then,” Steve replies. He tries not to let himself sound too sad about it.

Bucky doesn’t ask for clarification, just nods. After a moment’s silence, he speaks again. “Liking men and women is called _bisexual_ now. I read about that too.”

“I know what it’s called, Buck,” Steve says, but he does so with a smile to convey that he’s not mad about it.

Bucky’s lips quirk faintly upwards as well. He says, “Okay.”

Steve says, “Okay.”

* * *

On New Year’s Eve, Bucky says, “Do you remember that New Year’s in France where we had to camp out in the snow?”

Steve says, “Christ, I wish I could forget it. You wouldn’t stop moaning about the cold for the next three days.”

“Yeah, well, I talked to Morita on the phone the other day, and he swears his piss froze solid that night, so that’s two against one, Stevie.”

* * *

Steve comes back from a run shining and pink-cheeked from the cold, and Bucky is suddenly breathless with want. He remembers how utterly infatuated he always was with Steve’s blushes, how he’d brush kisses across Steve’s cheeks, his collarbones, the tips of his ears. The memory is so real it’s like he’s been smacked by it.

He chews on the inside of his own lip and lets the moment pass.

* * *

Sam visits them near the end of March. He’s thinking of moving to New York, he says, and wants to scope out a few neighborhoods. Tony has offered him a spot on the Avengers, claiming that they need another member now that Steve has unofficially retired.

“I still help out on major missions,” Steve protests.

“Take it up with Stark,” Sam says. “Honestly, the dude tried so hard to sound like a jerk about you leaving that I’m ninety-five percent sure he’s just covering for the fact that he has actual human emotions about other people.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Hey,” Sam says, brightening, “have you introduced Barnes to _Star Wars_ yet?”

“What’s _Star Wars_?” Bucky asks.

Steve shrugs dismissively. “Just some Buck Rogers rip-off.”

Sam chokes.

* * *

“I still can’t _believe_ the Dodgers moved to L.A.”

“Don’t even bring that up. I’m still so angry about that,” Steve says. “Shit, have you found out about bananas yet?”

“Oh my God, they’re the _worst_ now.”

“They’re garbage,” Steve agrees. “But you know what probably pisses me off the most about the future?”

Bucky knows that glint in Steve’s eye from a hundred half-drunk rants in their younger years, and he eggs Steve on shamelessly anyway. “What’s that, Stevie?”

Steve spreads his arms and shouts, “When did socialism become a dirty word?!”

“ _Right?!_ ”

* * *

Bucky doesn’t ask about the letter he wrote to Steve back in ‘44, but he remembers every word. Sometimes this is a bad thing; that letter was a catharsis, all of his grief and fury soaking into the paper via a shitty, leaking ballpoint pen. It makes Bucky so profoundly sorry for the man he used to be.

Other times, however, he’s intensely grateful to his past self for doing the heavy lifting of figuring out his feelings for Steve. With every cobweb that he clears out of his memory, it becomes more and more obvious that those feelings have simply been lying dormant. The more he becomes James Buchanan Barnes again, the more the feelings grow. The letter is his true north, a star map pointing him towards a name for what he feels. Loving Steve is easier when Bucky knows it’s happening.

Steve never mentions the letter, though, and therein lies the problem. It’s possible he read it and was hurt by Bucky unloading all of his pent-up feelings instead of saying goodbye. It’s possible he read it and feels guilty about how he’ll have to let Bucky down. It’s possible he never read it at all.

If Steve did read the letter, then a door has been opened that can never be shut. If he didn’t, then Bucky’s feelings are still a secret, and he’ll have to figure out what to do about them all over again. He doesn’t know which option he prefers.

After nearly a year of living together, Bucky finally screws up his courage and asks Steve about it point-blank.

“Did you read my letter?” he asks, plucking at the arm of the couch with his metal fingers, trying not to tear a hole in the fabric. There’s already one in the arm by Steve, the product of a panic attack he had a few months ago. “The one I wrote for you in case I died?”

Steve’s face, which had been occupied with smiling faintly at his sketchbook, completely shuts down. He says, “Yeah, I read it,” and offers no other comment. Bucky’s heart freezes up and splinters.

“I’m sorry,” he starts.

Steve looks up, startled. “What are you sorry for?”

Bucky opens his mouth to say something like, _It was unfair to dump all that shit on you in a goodbye letter_ or _Because things between us were finally starting to feel normal again, and now they’re probably going to be awkward as hell_.

What comes out instead is: “I really tried to get over you, you know.”

Steve’s brow furrows with confusion, but he doesn’t interrupt.

Bucky plows on, undaunted. “I didn’t want to spend my life miserable over you. I wanted so badly to make myself love you less. I wanted—Steve, I _wanted_ to love someone the way I loved you and to be loved by him and to really _have_ him in the way I could never have you. I wanted to put my nose in his hair at night and ask him how he slept each morning. But I couldn’t.” Bucky realizes that at some point he’s started trembling. “I loved you so much there wasn’t room for anyone else.”

Steve stares at him like he’s speaking revelation. It’s so tender that Bucky could cry.

“Bucky,” he says. “Buck. Jesus. Come here.” He opens his arms invitingly.

Bucky doesn’t think, just crawls over into the embrace.

Steve cradles him, resting his chin on top of Bucky’s head. They sit like that for a long time.

Once Bucky’s stopped shaking and his pulse has returned to normal, Steve speaks again.

“When I read your letter,” he begins slowly, “it made me so goddamn sad. Not because you’d done anything wrong by writing it—” His arms squeeze a little tighter around Bucky, just briefly, a reassurance more than anything else. “—but because I realized you’d been killing yourself keeping that secret from me for two years, and I’d been so absorbed in being Captain America that I didn’t even notice.”

Bucky straightens up in his arms, twisting until he can look Steve in the eye. He places his hands on either side of Steve’s face, holding him there. “It’s not your fault,” he says firmly. “Me keeping something from you? That is not your fault. Besides, you loved Peggy. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I’d told you earlier.”

Steve cocks his head as if to say, _Well, actually…_

Something so bright and so painful flares inside Bucky’s chest that it takes him a moment to recognize the feeling as hope. Hesitantly, he adds, “...Would it?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

A breath passes.

This time, Bucky is the one who kisses first.

Steve kisses him back immediately, his hands winding around Bucky’s waist and pulling him in close, so sharp Bucky gasps a little. Steve grins at that and kisses him harder until a little whimper escapes Bucky’s chest, and then Bucky is straddling Steve’s lap and running his hands up into Steve’s hair, careful with the metal one to make sure the plates don’t catch, and—

And then, abruptly, Steve pulls away. “Wait. Buck, wait,” he says, placing a hand on Bucky’s chest, fingers splayed. “We can’t—this can’t be like it was before.”

Instantly, Bucky is sitting back on his heels, the space between them rapidly cooling. He tries not to let the hurt show too much on his face.

It apparently gets through anyway, because Steve adds with almost desperate quickness, “No, no, I just mean we have to talk about things this time. We have to be honest with each other. No hiding how we feel just because we think we know what the other one’s thinking.”

“Okay. Honesty. I’ll give it a shot,” Bucky agrees, drumming his fingers thoughtfully on his thighs. “Honestly? I’m still in love with you. Head over heels, heart and soul, _à corps perdu_ , all that jazz.” He thrills at saying it in the present tense.

Steve melts a little beneath him and says, “Good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, leaning forward to mouth at Bucky’s stubble. “Because, well. Same here.”

Bucky laughs. “Jesus, and people said I was the smooth talker,” he teases sarcastically. “Did you rehearse that line or somethin’?”

Steve laughs too, mouth still pressed to his cheek, sending vibrations buzzing all throughout Bucky’s jaw. “Shut up.”

“Sorry, what was that? I’m too busy swooning over your absolute _poetry_ —”

Steve silences him with a quick kiss. “Fine, Jesus, I’m in love with you. You happy?”

“I’ll be happier once we’re in your bed and out of these clothes.”

Steve smirks and says, “Happy to oblige.”

But that’s not what happens. What happens is they fall into bed and as soon as Steve’s shirt is off, Bucky realizes how unfamiliar this body is under his hands, and he spends the next twenty minutes running his palms wonderingly and worshipfully across the planes of Steve’s torso and arms.

He finally pauses with his metal hand wrapped around the back of Steve’s neck and his flesh-and-blood one resting over Steve’s heart. “Hey Steve?” he murmurs, his forehead tipped against Steve’s. Bucky’s eyes are closed.

“Yeah, Buck?” Steve says in a voice not much above a whisper.

Bucky opens his eyes and looks directly into Steve’s. “I’m glad you took me back.” He pushes his forehead a little harder against Steve’s, trying to communicate that he means it in every sense. _Took me back_ , as in, _broke my programming_. _Took me back_ , as in, _brought me from Belarus to Brooklyn_. _Took me back_ , as in, _loved me too_.

Steve’s eyes crinkle with a smile. He leans in even closer, sliding his forehead off of Bucky’s, and presses his face softly into the side of Bucky’s own. “I’m glad you came home,” he says, voice muffled by Bucky’s cheek.

Bucky feels his shoulders relax just a little.

“Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you actually made it all the way here, thank you! This fic was almost entirely improvised (i.e. I had no plans in mind when I started), and I mostly wrote it in a hyperfocus-induced haze between the hours of 8 PM and midnight over the course of a couple weeks. The end result surprised even me in a lot of ways, not the least of which was the simple fact that I actually finished writing it.
> 
> A few scenes in this fic were very, very loosely inspired by [these](https://astrailhads.tumblr.com/post/615439874812772352/astrailhads1x04-1x08) [three](https://astrailhads.tumblr.com/post/614064881791008768/ok-but-imagine-all-the-guys-despite-the-initial) [posts](https://astrailhads.tumblr.com/post/614064752392617984/ah-belinda-ok-but-if-you-consider-that-bucky-is).
> 
> Even though I like the Commandos a lot, my knowledge of them comes primarily from other people's fics. Apologies for any Commando inaccuracies.
> 
> I don’t feel like I did particularly hardcore research for this (seriously, this is 90% based on skimmed Wikipedia articles, stuff I vaguely half-remember reading in the notes of fics by authors who did actual research, and the incomparable [“Mr. Rogers’ Gayborhood”](https://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/213805.html), so it's probably riddled with inaccuracies), but somehow my explanatory notes ended up being long enough that they don't fit in this character limit. Check them out in the first comment down below!


End file.
